Don't You Forget About Me

by Jancee Dunn

  Dawn was peering at me. Had I been standing there in a trance? “How about you?” I said brightly. “Do you still live here?”

  “No, we live in Belleville, so my husband, Dave, can take the train in. He’s a civil engineer for the city, in the bridge and tunnel division.” She tried unsuccessfully to fend off Kade, who kept slamming his head into her crotch. “I’ve got another one in school. Her name’s Kelsey. She’s seven and already so picky about her clothes. She and her friends know more about designer clothes than I do. God forbid they wear matching outfits, like we did.”

  My jaw tensed. Did she mean “we” as a generation, or was she referring to the two of us? Was she going there, so soon?

  “So are you visiting your folks?” she asked, her face impassive.

  “Yes, for a few weeks,” I said smoothly. “My job can wear me down, and I needed a break.” I didn’t want to link the divorce and my trip home.

  “You must meet so many interesting people at work. I feel like I never have a conversation with anyone over the first grade. I used to be in finance—I met Dave at Penn—but now I guess that correcting math homework is about as deep as it gets.” She laughed. “Do you have little ones?”

  I had crabs once, I thought. Does that count? I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said.

  Dawn nodded absently and checked her watch. “You know what? I have to get Kade to a playdate before I pick the other one up at school.” He yanked forcefully at her arm as she serenely ignored him. “Hey,” she added. “I don’t know if you have plans while you’re here, but if you want to slip away and get a cup of coffee, I could use the break.” At this point, Kade was nearly horizontal as he hung from her arm. Wasn’t Dawn worried? I could barely focus because the kid was three seconds away from a gaping head wound.

  “Sure,” I said quickly. Anything to get the kid to stop. “You probably don’t remember my home number, but it’s—”

  She grinned. “555-2084.” She colored. “Remember, I’m good with numbers.”

  I sat in the car for a moment after waving good-bye to Dawn’s retreating minivan. When we were kids, we concocted elaborate biographies for our grown-up selves, usually along the lines of a marine biologist or a fashion designer who lived in a SoHo loft and traveled to Antarctica and Paris. Now Dawn lived one town over and had married a guy named Dave. Did that mean she had never left Bethel? And why go through all of that schooling and then give it up to hang out at a park?

  I found myself smiling. Her admiring gaze made me sit up a little straighter. If she called me, I would definitely meet for coffee. Why not?

  On the way home I passed two teenage boys in a black sedan who craned their necks to get a better look at me. Oh, yes! Lillian Curtis has still got it! Admittedly, my face was a blur because I was driving twenty miles over the speed limit. And I was wearing sunglasses. Still, they looked.

  I was so distracted that I almost missed my turnoff into the CVS parking lot to pick up my dad’s heartburn medication—with strict instructions from my parents to buy the store-brand knockoff—and I had to return a DVD of Some Kind of Wonderful to the tiny rental store next door. I had been working my way through old John Hughes movies and was pleased to find that they held up nicely.

  My parents’ endless round of suburban errands made me chafe, but I never needed coercion to go to CVS. It baffled Vi that I could have a strong emotional connection to a drugstore chain. She would shake her head sadly when I explained that the tangy, chemical aroma of strawberry Bonne Bell Lip Smackers sent me dreamily back to childhood. “You know what takes me back to growing up in Kansas?” she would say, clucking. “The scent of hay. Or burning leaves, or even cow manure, which, to me, was never unpleasant. But that junk doesn’t even smell like a proper strawberry.”

  How could I fully explain to Vi the wonder and magic of CVS? It was my Tiffany’s, where nothing bad could happen to you. The welcoming automatic doors, the cheery red shopping baskets, the tender, womblike embrace of the industrial gray carpeting, so much more lavish than the cold linoleum of your inferior chain drugstore! Ginny claimed that volatile organic compounds lurked in the rug and increased my risk of infertility, but I didn’t care. CVS! All had stayed reassuringly the same since I was a child: the squat red logo, the vests worn by beleaguered but friendly teen employees, the Hall and Oates songs playing over the speakers. My world would have crumbled had the perfume cabinet not stood by the doorway as always, inexplicably locked and housing colognes unchanged since the Carter administration: Jean Naté, Love’s Baby Soft, Brut, L’Air du Temps, Charlie.

  During my first, homesick year of college, I spent hours drifting through the aisles of the local CVS in Ithaca, lingering over every section. What other store carried three rows of Lip Smackers? Three-packs, six-packs, pocket-sized, jumbo, Lip Smackers with string to wear around your neck, holiday flavors like gingerbread or candy cane, glitter-studded, scented like candy (bubble gum, chocolate) or soda (Dr Pepper). But they all smelled the same, really. The gingerbread smelled kind of like the root beer. Which was not a bad thing.

  I made my way to the candy aisle. One side of it always displayed wonderfully dubious confections in cloudy cellophane bags—Circus Peanuts, Maple Nut Goodies, caramel bull’s-eyes—while the other side rolled out seasonal candy four months in advance. On to the school supplies: twenty varieties of folders, daily planners, fat pens with six different kinds of ink. I inspected everything with satisfaction. No matter how broke you were, there was always something you could afford in CVS.

  As I rounded a display of body wipes to study the skin-care products, I stopped abruptly. The middle-aged woman on my left—the one opening a bottle of lotion and sniffing cautiously—looked familiar. I turned my face away, pretending to be absorbed in the overnight foot cream, and sneaked a look at her. She was tall and slim, with short reddish hair souffléd into a bob. Was she a teacher? No. Wait a minute. That mole on her cheek.

  It was Christian’s mother.

  My heart pounded sickeningly. Steady now, I told myself. Steady as she goes. She’s not looking your way, and even if she was, there is scant chance that she would recognize you, as you have only met her twice in your entire life. For Christ’s sake, get a hold of yourself.

  But I could not. Blindly, I groped for a tube of antibacterial hand wash and pretended to read the ingredients while craning my neck ever so slightly to inventory the red shopping basket at her feet. Lightbulbs. Pet vitamins. Was Christian’s dog Rufus still alive? He would be at least twenty by now. Did dogs live to twenty? Some sort of lozenges to…looks like…yes, to quit smoking. Who was smoking?

  It was unthinkable that I should stroll over and inquire about her son. She replaced the lotion, glanced my way, and frowned slightly. I tossed the antibacterial hand wash back into the bin as if it were crawling with fire ants and blundered into the next aisle, lingering among the saline solution until I was certain she had gone.

  I rocketed the car out of the parking lot, turning on the radio with one hand while turning heedlessly into traffic with the other. “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure was playing. It was Christian’s favorite band. When Ginny and I were teenagers, we were convinced that certain songs on the radio carried prophetic messages. One of Duran Duran’s rarer tracks—“Rio,” perhaps, which had never cracked the Top Ten—was a signal from the great beyond that a hookup was imminent. Clearly Robert Smith was trying to tell me the same thing.

  chapter ten

  “I’m home!” I yelled, opening the front door.

  My mother was putting away some dishes in the sideboard. She stood up. “Hi, Lillian,” she said, peering at me. “Why are you so flushed? Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine.” I threw my purse onto a chair.

  “Hell-o,” she said. “That’s not where it goes.” At least she didn’t add “young lady,” as she used to.

  “Sorry,” I said, picking it up.

  I tossed it into my room, shut myself in my parents’ tiny
home office, and turned on their cold-war-era computer to check my e-mail. First I touched down—so very briefly—on Rick Springfield’s website, because I had some questions. Ah, yes—he was still touring, and he had a live DVD, too. Still married as well. The dog that adorned the cover of his 1981 album, Working Class Dog, had long since croaked, but apparently he had a new one, named Gomer. Just a few peeks at his Photo Gallery and I would move on.

  Then I clicked onto Adam’s real estate firm, the Havilland Group, for a quick look-see. Hm. I had to allow that his new photo looked good. It nicely showcased the deep dimple on his right cheek. Peeking out from his charcoal-colored suit was a shirt in a groovy violet hue, a shade that might as well have been called Newly Single Guy Purple. Claiming that he had “fifteen years’ experience” in his bio was pushing it, but no matter. It seemed that Adam was in charge of selling units from the Platinum, Water Street’s Preeminent Luxury Building.

  Distinctive. Original. The Platinum’s expansive menu of unique amenities includes a sparkling-water concierge and a fleet of telescopes on the roof to spy on naughty neighbors. What’s your pleasure? A club room with billiard table and plasma TV, an authentic Turkish hammam? A state-of-the-art golf simulation area, a stretching room with bamboo flooring? Enjoy your morning cappuccino in our luxury club lounge. Have our concierge phone you a limo as you wait in the lobby by our indoor birch forest, and contemplate our collection of world-renowned art. See the latest film in our screening room with complimentary popcorn. It’s all here.

  Adam and I used to laugh at these sorts of descriptions—the humid, semi-pornographic lingo, the painful wording (“for the truly unique individual”). Maybe I could call him and tease him about it, a lighthearted interlude after our last strained exchange. I dialed his new work number.

  “Adam Sheffield’s office,” a voice said crisply.

  “Oh. Hi. I didn’t realize he had a secretary.”

  “Assistant,” she corrected. “May I help you?”

  “This is Lillian.”

  Her voice lightened. “Lily from Yeager Realty?”

  “No, Lillian the ex-wife.”

  She didn’t laugh. “One moment, please,” she said, putting me on hold before I could thank her.

  “Hey, you,” he said. He sounded friendly, even eager. We could do this.

  “Oh, my,” I said. “A secretary. As we say in the Garden State, fa-fa-fa.” New Jerseyites—and Long Islanders—say this with a posh accent while pantomiming the holding of a porcelain teacup with their pinky in the air.

  “Carly’s great,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  “I was just looking at the website for the Platinum. It offers everything but a chocolate fountain.”

  This would normally elicit a chuckle. I could hear the sound of shuffling paper.

  “So, what’s going on?”

  I realized I needed an agenda. It wasn’t enough simply to call him anymore. “You didn’t happen to find my address book, did you?” I said quickly.

  “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact I couldn’t even find mine after the move. I just bought a new one.”

  “Have you been writing any new numbers in it?” I tried to sound playful.

  A pause. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that.”

  “But we’re friends now,” I said, my voice rising ever so slightly. “That’s what friends talk about.”

  Another pause. “This is too weird for me. I’m sorry. Maybe it’s too soon for us to be casual friends.” Mercifully, he changed the subject. “But it’s good to hear from you!” he said brightly. “How has it been, being at your folks’ house?”

  I told him some funny stories, but his uh-huhs grew fainter as the tapping on the computer became more audible.

  “You’re obviously busy,” I said, hoping he would contradict me.

  “Yeah, I really should go,” he said. “Say hi to your parents.”

  I hung up, my cheeks ablaze. Adam had never even mentioned me to Carly, a woman who organized his life, a woman who took calls from people I did not know and would likely never meet. I had been married to Adam for over a decade, but somehow, during the entire livelong day, he had never brought me up to Carly. Carly’s great.

  Tears of embarrassment slid from my eyes down my nose and splotched onto the keyboard. Four months after we split, and I was still crying in the shower so my parents wouldn’t hear. In the meantime, Adam had sidestepped my question about seeing someone.

  My New York friends who knew us as a couple periodically called and wrote with messages of support, but I sensed that most of them had gravitated toward Adam, a handsome single male in New York with a flashy new job who cheerfully waived his broker’s fee for apartment-hunting pals. Meanwhile I lived with my parents in the suburbs and got a charge out of going to CVS. My New York friends weren’t unkind, but I wasn’t a subway ride away anymore, and their lives barreled onward.

  I wiped my eyes and sighed. A friend had suggested making a list of Adam’s annoying habits to make the split easier. He couldn’t fix anything, for starters. He never flossed, despite my warnings that gum disease could lead to heart trouble. Never once did I observe that man floss, and in my mind, plaque had spackled his teeth into one single curved unit on the bottom and one on the top. Also, when some of his friends would call—fellow nice Jewish boys who grew up with him in Westchester—he’d lapse into the most mortifying homie-speak. What up? Nuh-in!

  Not to mention that every single day of our marriage, he shed his socks by the side of the bed, two pungent snake skins waiting for me to deposit them into the hamper. When he would put on a CD, he’d whistle along in the most piercingly tuneless way. When I would remind him that the purpose of putting on music was to actually hear it, he’d laugh and promise to refrain.

  More tears. Oh Lord. Because my little list wasn’t that damning. The truth was that Adam was a human golden retriever, sloppy and energetic and so affable that he sometimes smiled in his sleep. He said I grounded him. Or was it that I kept him down?

  I briskly closed the computer. Vi would be ashamed at my sniveling. I meandered downstairs to root through my parents’ refrigerator. It comforted me to see all of their condiments. To me, a fridge stuffed full of ketchup and lite salad dressing and mayonnaise and jars of pickles—albeit ones so ancient and the fluid so cloudy that it resembled a specimen jar—meant festivity and birthday parties and barbecues.

  My parents, like Adam, had always been much more social than I. Every weekend a loop of their friends made their way noisily through the house. As a teenager I would slouch down at noon on a Saturday morning in my pajamas to the shrieking delight of my parents’ cronies, already on their second Bloody Mary as they clustered around the stove to judge the chili cook-off. At first, I would shrug into some decent clothes and swipe on some lipstick before I descended the stairs. Then I realized that my pajamas and sleep-puffed eyes were part of the shtick, so that my father could cry, “Gangway! Here it comes! Don’t make it mad!”

  I liked people, in theory. How I wished I could be some sort of benevolent old Italian man whose dozens of grandchildren ran in and out of his villa, crashing with a giggle into the groups of friends who were constantly arriving to nibble on the antipasti arrayed hospitably on the sideboard, the sort of open-hearted patriarch who mock complained that he never had enough chairs for everyone and that the house was never properly clean, but eh, it’s not about that, is it? Clean house, empty heart! More grappa? Salute!

  Instead I had to stop myself from hiding under the kitchen table when the intercom buzzed in my apartment. It wasn’t just that I was usually wearing some inappropriate outfit like Adam’s boxers rolled at the waist, threadbare Socks to Stay Home In, and one of the many promotional T-shirts I received from Vi’s advertisers that touted blood-pressure monitors or orthopedic supports. It was also that I was unable to relax, even in my own apartment, so afraid was I that my drop-ins were not having the time of their lives. As
my mother said, I have always been watchful.

  No luck in the refrigerator. On to the pantry: crackers with added fiber, “fiber-rich” cereal bars, high-fiber hot chocolate. No, no, and no. I poked around on the second shelf where my father reliably stashed his bag of Chips Ahoy! What was this? Whole Grain Chips Ahoy! Every snack that they had resembled some sort of kindling: twiglike cereal, flaxseed chips, bran crispbread. How much fiber did seniors require? It was a wonder my parents hadn’t hired a circus attendant to walk behind them with a shovel. And didn’t they have an additional arsenal of products in their bathroom cabinet with names like Mount Vesuvius Psyllium Capsules and Super Colon Blast?

  I finally excavated a generic version of Doritos called Dos Titos, which sounded like Spanish for “two breasts,” but at least it was nonfibrous. I grabbed the bag and ran up to my bedroom. I felt safer there than I did anywhere else in the world, even in my last apartment with Adam, which was undeniably cozy but infested with roaches. There were no roaches in my parents’ suburban house.

  I glanced around the room, seeking to eradicate the memory of my clumsy conversation with Adam. I could always reread the note I got from Christian—my only written artifact from him, aside from two letters sent during our first few months of college in freshman year before he cut me off completely. I still had not fully explored my dresser, which I vowed to do in increments in order to harvest forgotten treasures such as the Swatch watch I recently found.