Don't You Forget About Me

by Jancee Dunn

  I fished it out of the third drawer and held it up. It was called the Osiris, with the Eye of Horus stamped on the top of its pink face and hieroglyphics inscribed along its bottom. One band was gray and the other was that particularly hideous shade of eighties mustard. It was in perfect condition, although I had gotten it in 1986 along with Lynn, Kimmy, and Sandy. We had collectively decided that the Egyptian design was more worldly and arty than, say, an abstract pattern of pink and aqua diamonds, and so we wore them as a group to express our individuality. Lynn’s signature look was two Swatches on one wrist and one on the other, while Kimmy wore one, daringly, to tie back her hair.

  Gingerly I took out a note. From Christian? No, it was from Lynn.

  Lillian, do you want to sleep over tonight? My mom is getting mad at me because I never do anything anymore. Kimmy might come too. If you come over we probably won’t eat anything because I’m on this massive diet. Sorry, my pen just ran out. Okay I found a pencil. As I was saying. I only eat like one meal a day usually when I come home from school. It consists of:

  1/2 ham and cheese sandwich

  1 orange

  2 swallows of diet soda

  Sounds good huh. I started yesterday. So we won’t be eating much o.k. If you want, you can bring your own stuff. Look at me, I’m talking like you said you could come over. You probably have to babysit or something or don’t want to come. I understand. I’m too ugly & boring for you. It’s o.k., maybe some other time. No seriously you can come if you want.

  Got to go, class is almost over.

  Bye! Lynn

  Lynn never did get over her eating issues. After the birth of her son she lost the baby weight in three weeks with a maniacal schedule of marathon training. I scrabbled around the drawer some more until I found the note from Christian. Although I was alone in the room I blushed slightly as I flopped onto my bed and opened it yet again. I could remember every detail of that May morning when he passed that note to me. The class was restless as Mr. Clifford droned on about classical conditioning. Behind his back, he had been christened “Mr. Clit-ford” by students whose apex of creativity in life was devising names for unpopular teachers. They clung precipitously to a D average but could handily turn Mr. Bodem into “Mr. Scrotum.”

  Christian had made out with me, miraculously, at a basement party the weekend before. I was coming out of the bathroom, and there he stood, to my astonishment, grinning and blocking the door with his arm. I had had no idea he was even attracted to me, and the mystery continued the following Monday, when he had simply waved at me in the hallway and mouthed, What’s up? Still, I enjoyed a decidedly more enthusiastic welcome at the popular table in the cafeteria.

  Beautiful Christian, with the shock of black hair tumbling over his eyes like Johnny Marr from the Smiths! I never fidgeted in social studies because he sat three rows up from me and the back of his head was directly in range for an extravagant forty-five minutes. Making brief eye contact with Mr. Clifford bought me extra time to linger on Christian as he shifted in his seat, his left leg—always the left—jiggling constantly. I missed nothing, making mental notes every two minutes as if I were creating a captain’s log. When Mr. Clifford rummaged in his desk for more chalk, I observed that Christian wore his black Chuck Taylors, maroon corduroys, a Ramones T-shirt, and the green army jacket that he had worn the previous Tuesday. Look, he was writing something directly on his social studies book! I would never deface a book. His pen slashed back and forth. Was he crossing something out? Or maybe it was a drawing of a lightning bolt.

  His eyes looked a little puffy. I pictured him in his dark bedroom listening to a Clash album past midnight. Or maybe it was the English Beat, whose name I saw him scribble on a desk last week, along with SPECIAL BEAT SERVICE in capital letters. Were the bedroom walls painted black? Did he make his bed, or was it always messy? I couldn’t imagine him doing anything as mundane as brushing his teeth. I only saw him as I did movie stars, moving from one significant scene to the next. On the lower left quadrant of his head were two loose curls of hair that he kept tucking behind his ear. When we had made out I made a point of hesitantly touching the curls that I had stared at fixedly, Monday through Friday, for a year.

  He bent over his desk, rapidly writing something in his notebook. Then he ripped off the page—a few kids jerked awake from the noise—and folded it into a tiny package. It was probably for his toady, Lance, who sat two rows over and was constantly trying to catch Christian’s eye and make him laugh with obscene gestures. Christian twisted in his seat and I hurriedly glanced down. “Lily!” he whispered. “Hey!”

  A current shot through the class as twenty-four pairs of eyes flicked in my direction. I looked up and in one smooth movement Christian threw the note at me. I stopped breathing, having attempted to catch many a note only to have them ricochet out of my hands, but it landed lightly on my desk. I opened it, keeping my face carefully neutral except for the slightest conspiratorial lip curl, as if this was only the latest dispatch from Christian Somers. I opened it up and read it: “THIS IS SO FUCKIN BORING.”

  What to do what to do what to do. Do I write back? What would I say? How about “WHEN WILL THIS END”? No. No. More forceful. Maybe “KILL ME NOW.” But oh, Lord, what if I wrote back, threw it, and missed? He turned around and I smiled at him, then rolled my eyes in what I hoped was a THIS IS SO FUCKIN BORING way.

  I lay back on my bed and sighed. Oh, please, Christian, don’t be too hip to attend the reunion. And if you do go, and you have male pattern baldness, may it start at the crown rather than the hairline. That’s all I’m asking.

  chapter eleven

  “Lillian!” my father called from the hallway. “Want to go for a ride? I could use the company.” My dad always liked for me to join him on his Saturday errands. I was perfectly content staying in my room, but a sense of obligation compelled me to grab my coat. I was still a guest, after all.

  “Sure, Dad,” I said hurriedly. When my ex-army-captain father wanted us to do something, we responded quickly. I bounded down the stairs and he was already at the door, impatiently jingling his keys and scowling. His temper, always robust, had grown strangely worse after his retirement. Usually he was one malfunctioning remote control away from liftoff. His tirades were more flash than heat, but when they started, we duly fled the room in what I imagined was a satisfying way. His explosions, at least, were brief, unlike his rants, which were excruciating not just for their length but because I had to carefully stifle a laugh at some of his expressions. If he commenced with You know what cheeses me off? I could barely listen to the rest, so intent was I on composing my face into a sympathetic mask. If he detected even a flicker of amusement, rant would surge to rage.

  I suspected that his rants were his way of keeping himself tethered to the larger world after his retirement, although it was mostly my mother who had to endure them. He would buttonhole her as she tried to read the morning paper or, worse, would follow her around the house as she emptied wastebaskets or put away laundry, talking nonstop as she nodded absently.

  Some complaints were local, such as the Neighbor’s Goddamn Dog, Yap, Yap, Yap, All the Livelong Day, but most of his rage was reserved for society’s general decline. His greatest hits included the following:

  • The phone companies: Press one to speak English. Why should you have to press anything to speak English, for shit’s sake?

  • Those commercials at the movies now: The movie says two o’clock, but there’s fifteen minutes of commercials and what have you. Then you get some human garbage talking in front of you for the entire movie, and you can’t get a manager to make them stop because nobody works there, it’s all automated. Computers run the world now.

  • Fixed-price menus for $19.95: But then they charge you ten dollars for a glass of wine. Half the price of the stinkin’ meal!

  • Kids blaring music in their cars: They’re all going to be deaf by the time they’re fifty, and you know what? Good.

  • Tipping:
It’s the business owner’s responsibility to pay waiters. You don’t tip at department stores. It’s a ridiculous custom. It’s extortion, is what it is.

  • Human garbage on their cell phones: I thought all the nuts were in New York City with the cell phones, but now we got ’em everywhere.

  • Bottled water: Everybody under thirty has to carry around a bottle of water with them like they’re dying of thirst. It costs more than Scotch!

  Sometimes my mother would whirl on him and say, “Don, stop it. You’re working yourself up so much that I’m afraid you’re going to have a heart attack.”

  This was just the sort of feisty give-and-take he wanted. “You get mad at me when I hold things in, you get mad at me when I let things out. So what do you want me to do?”

  Then she would sigh and continue to empty the wastebasket as he resumed his denouncement of separate medical plans for Congress.

  In his gruff way, my father loved us. His motto was “Fix it.” There was nothing he hated worse than inaction (or, as he put it, “jackin’ around”). If he passed a stranded motorist, he stopped, brought out his jumper cables, and had them back on the road in ten minutes.

  One spring Saturday as we pulled up at an automotive-parts store, we saw a small crowd gathered around a middle-aged man sprawled on the ground. His breath came in ragged gasps as his panicked eyes darted from one person to another.

  “Heart attack, probably,” my father muttered, pushing his way to the man as he whipped off his coat, balled it up, and put it under the man’s head.

  “An ambulance is on its way,” said a guy in mechanic’s overalls.

  The murmuring people fell silent, watching my dad. He looked up sharply and glared at everybody. “If you’re not being useful, go about your business,” he barked. Most of them scattered.

  “Can you hear me?” he asked the man, who nodded but could not speak. “I’m no doctor, but it could be that you’re having a mild heart attack. I want you to try and calm down and get your breathing regular.” To my astonishment, he took the man’s hand. “I had a heart attack,” he said, looking intently at him. “I lived. I’m here. See how strong I look? My daughter might disagree, but I’m telling you I’m as strong as a horse.” The man’s breathing slowed and he nodded, his lips even twitching into a grimace of a smile. We could hear sirens blaring in the distance.

  My father smiled. “I’m just fine. Okay? You hear me? You’ll be fine too.”

  We watched as the man was bundled into an ambulance. As it drove away, I said, “Dad, you never had a heart attack.”

  “No. But I imagine if you’re in that position, you want to see a person who did, who is walking and talking and getting his oil changed on a Saturday. His heart was going like a jackhammer, and if we didn’t do something, another attack might have finished that poor sucker off.” Then he strode off to talk to a mechanic about his car.

  On errand days we mostly drove in companionable silence as we listened to the oldies station on the radio. “Now, that’s music,” he would say, turning up the Drifters or Sam Cooke. The Saturday destinations were rarely exciting, so I braced myself for our latest excursion as I followed him into the garage and got into the car. “I have to go get a plunge router,” he muttered, and then his need for moral support became clear. He hated going to the hardware superstore that had hastened his retirement and derailed plans to sell his own store, Center Street Hardware (slogan: “Yes, we have it!”). It had been a neighborhood institution since he opened it in the early seventies, but it was no match for the new twenty-aisle supercenter and he had reluctantly closed it last year and sold the building. Its new owner was a Korean manicure place called Confetti of Nail.

  My father avoided the new store for months, but given that he was forever fixing up the house, he grudgingly broke down one morning and grimly marched in to purchase some plastic sheeting. Each subsequent visit culminated with him storming out of the store, cursing under his breath and furiously whipping his plastic bag into the backseat.

  “Come on, Dad,” I said heartily as we drove to the supercenter. “We’ll have some laughs.”

  We passed Dunkin’ Donuts (hilariously dubbed “Drunken Donuts” when I was a teen), our local diner, the Nautilus (aka “the Nauseous”), and Friendly’s (“Unfriendly’s,” where we’d get a “Reese’s Feces” sundae). A young guy with a tattooed arm hanging out of the window zoomed past us, gunning his souped-up engine. “Look at this shit,” my father said sourly. “What’s he in such a hurry to get to? Obviously not the barbershop.” He muttered curse words for a few minutes, unable to let it go. Then we caught up to him at a stoplight and my father glowered at him, unblinking. The kid met his eyes and quickly looked down.

  “Speed demon,” barked my father, still aiming his furious laser-beam gaze at the kid, who was staring with great concentration at the light. “Big hurry. And here we are at the same light. Well, you picked up fifty feet.”

  The kid sped away and we pulled into the parking lot.

  My father stopped the car and looked at me. “You’re coming in, right?”

  I nodded. He got out first and walked ahead of me. With his skinny arms thrown back, his sharp chin thrust forward, and his quick movements, he looked like a grackle getting ready to quarrel over a scrap of bread. He never wore a jacket unless the temperature was subarctic, so even though it was a chilly October day he was clad in his usual “dungarees” and plaid flannel shirt.

  He liked to do advance surveillance of a situation, even if I was only five paces behind him, so that he could deliver bulletins over his shoulder. “Look at the trash out front,” he called back at me disgustedly. “They haven’t emptied this can in days. First thing a customer sees when he walks up to the entrance.”

  I used to help him in his store as a stand-in son, and I was inevitably enlisted to hold the ladder when he cleaned the gutters on the roof, or to pick up tree branches and rocks while he mowed the lawn. Ginny, with her more delicate build and frequent migraines, used to beg off so frequently that my father had stopped asking her to help.

  “You know, I bought some crown molding here once that didn’t match,” said my father, striding into the entrance so quickly that I was almost running next to him, “and they wouldn’t let me return it because it had been eight days, and they have a cockamamie policy where you have to return it within the week. At my store, we took things back that were years old. They didn’t even need a receipt. I knew all my customers. Here, it’s a different high school kid every week.” He stopped in front of a pimply teenage boy wearing a red smock.

  “Hi, son. I need a plunge router. There’s one that’s preset with three plunge depths; that’s the one I need.”

  The kid stared at him, his wet mouth slightly open. “Well, is it, like, something to cut wood, or, like—”

  “You know what?” my father interrupted. “I’ll find it.” I thought of my dad behind the counter at Center Street in his neat sweater vest and white shirt, saying, “Follow me, sir,” and disappearing down the cramped aisles.

  “Look at this,” he muttered, picking up paintbrushes and replacing them on their hooks. “Stock all over the g.d. floor. Do you know I’ve been in here dozens of times and not once have I seen the owner? It’s not a career anymore. It’s an eight-dollar-an-hour stopover.”

  “I know everyone misses you, Dad.”

  “Hell, I run into my old customers all the time. They actually stop and ask me questions. I should be getting a commission. Christ. At least I know a thing or two about a thing or two.” He strode off to inquire about renting a power washer while I inspected some drawer pulls. Because of my childhood in my father’s store, I could lose myself for hours among plumbing parts and hooks and nails. I was even moderately handy—thanks to my dad, I could work a drill and build a birdhouse. I headed for the paint colors and examined them for a while, enjoying the poetic names. Turkish Coffee. Purple Twilight. Serengeti.

  I looked up. “Dad?” Was he outside? “Dad?
”

  “Over here!”

  I scanned the aisles but all I saw was the top of an old man’s head, bald except for a few patches of downy white fuzz. My heart had contracted as the stranger looked up and smiled. “Ready to go?” asked my dad.

  chapter twelve

  As the reunion approached, every morning brought new e-mails from seemingly every classmate except Christian. It was nice, at least, to hear from Sandy.

  Hey hon! Remember me? Haven’t talked to you in forever. How have you been? You know I’m in still in Phoenix, right? Family is good, driving me crazy as usual. I just had number three! Me, who hated babysitting! Heard from Lynn—you know she’s coming to the reunion. I’m leaving the kids with Ryan—see ya! Maybe I’ll stay an extra week, ha ha. Hey my parents are going to be at the shore so we can even have a pre-party at my house (I can’t believe I just wrote that!)

  I became friendly with Sandy in sophomore year of high school, after Kimmy, Lynn, and I had fused into a trio. Sandy and I were early arrivals at school each morning. I had coerced my father into dropping me off at school on his way to work, even though it was a full hour before school began, because I didn’t want my carefully sculpted perm to frizz as I walked to school. After spending half an hour carefully blow-drying it with a diffuser and dousing it with Aussie Sprunch Spray, I couldn’t take the chance of any humidity wreaking havoc on my poufy creation.

  Sandy also hitched an early ride with her dad, because she needed a large coffee in the morning and her mother wouldn’t let her have any at home because it would stunt her growth. I had noticed her in the empty hallways, joking around with Doug the janitor, but I was too bashful to approach. One morning she strolled by me as I studied for a math test and called, “Want some coffee? I have a connection.”