by Jancee Dunn
She told me to follow her and led me to the very back of the closed cafeteria. “Aren’t we going to get in trouble?” I whispered, but she ignored me.
“Hey, chicas!” she said to a gaggle of cafeteria ladies, one of whom was hastily moving to stub out a cigarette until she saw that it was Sandy.
“Morning, Sandy,” said one. “Guess you’ll be wanting your coffee. And who’s this? You’re Lillian, right?”
I realized I had never exchanged a single word with any of them beyond “hello.” I smiled and nodded.
“Could we have a bagel?” Sandy wheedled. “Just one? We’ll split it.”
The huskiest of the women said, “We’re not supposed to be giving you bagels.”
“And you’re not supposed to be smoking, either,” Sandy returned as the women cackled. One of them heaved herself up with a groan to get Sandy a bagel with extra cream cheese. From that day forward, Sandy dragged me everywhere she went. I basked in her preternatural confidence.
It took a while to convince Kimmy and Lynn to admit Sandy into the group. Sandy had a big mouth, bigger boobs (later she had a breast reduction), and was incapable of being intimidated. Her unruly hair was a little too curly, and her clothes were a tad too bright, even for the eighties. Her favorite skirt was covered in neon yellow taxicabs, which she wore with her older brother’s scissored black T-shirt and black penny loafers. She cheerfully pulled it off because yellow taxicabs matched her outsized personality. Kimmy and Lynn warmed to Sandy when they learned that her parents had a house at the Jersey shore that was nearly always empty.
Sandy was my favorite among all those girls, and we had many late-night drunken conversations in which we dissected the meaning of life while inwardly congratulating ourselves on our extraordinary depth. Over the years those conversations had thinned until our only communication was her annual Christmas card, and a few e-mailed pictures of her kids, which I eagerly opened because they always made me laugh. Sandy never liked to send conventional shots of children grinning at Disney World. Instead she forwarded pictures of her kids behaving badly—screaming, red-faced, in the bathtub, angrily pulling off a Halloween princess costume, or, for the holidays, crying and flailing on Santa’s knee.
Sandy had been an elementary school teacher for a few years but had stopped when the kids came along. I hesitated as I wrote a reply.
San-DEE! I can’t wait to see you. Did you know that I’m a single girl now? Adam and I got a divorce.
Too devil-may-care. “As it happens, Adam and I got a divorce.” Strangely worded. “Remember you called Adam ‘the perfect man’? It turns out that he wasn’t.” Too bitter.
Mercifully, the phone rang. “I’ll get it, Don,” I heard my mother call. “Oh, hi, Ginny!” She never got that sprightly tone in her voice when I called, but then again, Ginny only phoned every two weeks or so. I heard my father run to pick up the phone in the den. “What? Why, sure,” said my mother. “Well, of course we’d love to have you.”
Have her where? I got up and crept across the upstairs hall to my parents’ bedroom, expertly avoiding the spots where the floor creaked, a practice I had honed years ago when I would arrive home late, bombed on berry wine coolers. I was filled with unreasonable excitement as I stealthily approached the phone.
The trick to listening in on the extension was to pick up the headset while holding the latch. Then ease the latch up slowly. No heavy breathing; it must be shallow both through the mouth and nose. Many a phone spy has been caught by unmodified nose breathing. Slowly. Slowly.
“…the decent hotels in Princeton were already booked, so you’re sure it’s okay?” Ginny was saying. “I promise to stay for only a few days.”
They all laughed merrily at my expense.
“Of course,” said my mother.
“I’ll miss the kids but it’ll be nice to get away. It’s that APA conference I go to every year. I’m chairing a panel on heuristic biases. You remember I told you about heuristics? It’s basically decisions based on emotion, often against the person’s best interests. Anyway, this session is on the contagion heuristic, which is the more extreme form that you often see during wartime or in cases of mob violence.”
My parents made approving noises, but I could tell they didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.
“And how are my grandchildren?” my mother asked.
“Oh, they’re fine. We’re having a bit of a battle about the television. The kids are screaming and yelling because we only allow television on weekends.”
Well, that left the kids more time to play with their hand-hewn blocks made of reclaimed wood and solvent-free organic paint.
“What was that?” asked Ginny. Whoops. I must have snorted at my own witticism. I carefully eased down the latch and tiptoed back into my bedroom, just in time to hear my mother yelling up that Ginny wanted to talk to me. I ran noisily back to the phone in my folks’ bedroom and picked it up.
“Hi, Lillian,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m coming to stay for a few days, and it would be so great if we could really catch up. I feel like I haven’t been as supportive as I should be, and I…well, I want to be there for you.”
I fought back sudden tears. Ginny could be sanctimonious, but she had always been kind and protective of me. “I would love to,” I said, my voice breaking. “I miss you, Ginny.”
“Now you’re going to make me cry,” she said, snuffling. “I miss you, too. I’m sorry you’re going through such a hard time.” I could hear a woman’s voice in the background, then silence.
“Lillian,” Ginny said in a low voice. “Okay. Can you hear me?”
“Barely.”
“My nanny just walked in. Remember Irina? You met her once. She does the same thing every day: At nine in the morning, she walks in, takes her cell phone, and then goes to the bathroom for fifteen or twenty minutes. Can you hear her in there?” She put the phone near the door and I heard loud laughter.
“Is she…is she…”
“Number two? Oh yes, indeed.”
“Can’t she do her business before she gets there?” I whispered. I didn’t know why I was talking quietly, too.
“And how would I tell her to do that?”
“Oh, Lord. You’re a germ freak, too.”
“I run in there afterward with bleach spray. Hold on. My kid’s banging on the bathroom door. Jordan, honey? Irina’s having her private time. Go play.”
“Maybe Irina needs some reading material. Why don’t you give her the paper?”
“I just heard a flush. Here she comes.” Irina’s muffled voice. “Did you hear that?” Ginny said.
“No.”
“She just patted her belly and said, ‘I feel ten pounds lighter.’ I’m going to go open a window. See you soon.”
I hung up and sighed. No one, not my mother, not even Adam, could elicit in me the sort of complex emotions that Ginny could—a frustrated tenderness, an admiring hostility. I wondered what sort of emotions I brought out in her, but assuming it would be some variation of pity, I didn’t really want the answer.
chapter thirteen
The following afternoon, I was hunched over my old boom box in my bedroom, playing some cassette tapes I had rescued from a box wedged in the back of my closet. I used to tape tunes off the radio, so the whole cassette was a series of song snippets of varying volume and clarity. If I had actually managed to tape a song from the beginning, a deejay ruined the introduction with chatter. “Aannd right now we have Echo and the Bunnymen with ‘Lips Like Sugar.’ Folks, an interesting note: Echo is supposedly the name of the band’s drum machine. Beautiful fall day, and comin’ up, we’ll be getting the Led out for Zep-tember, so stay with your friends at WDHA, the Rock of North Jersey, Lips! Like! Sugar! Mmm, sounds good to me.”
This nattering that continued right up until the moment when Ian McCulloch began to sing once enraged me, but now I found that I liked the sound of the deejay’s friendly voice. When I used to play that song,
I would wait by my bedroom door and when the chorus dramatically kicked in, I’d pantomime that I was bursting in the door to a high school party. I’d be rushed and excited and pretending not to notice that all eyes were on me as I made my way to the bar—make that the keg—as hands reached out to detain me, voices called to me, Fuzzy Navel drinks were passed to me. I must have rehearsed this moment hundreds of times, even though my actual entrance to parties usually involved trooping awkwardly into a living room enveloped by a gaggle of girls. I never would have dared to enter a high school party by myself.
I fast-forwarded the tape past “Lips Like Sugar.” A tinny pastiche of songs followed, mixed with more deejay chatter and chirpy themes of long-dead local radio stations. Radio tapings differed from the carefully cultivated mix tapes made to show off your admirably quirky musical taste to friends. They were for your ears alone—the Whitesnake and Foreigner power ballads, the lite R&B from Ray Parker, Jr., and Billy Ocean. I had just turned up a muffled version of Billy’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” when I heard my mother’s voice hollering up the stairs.
I shut off my boom box. “What?”
“Dawn’s on the phone!” she yelled, just as she had twenty years ago.
“Got it!” I yelled back, even though she was three yards away. I had dragged out my Princess phone festooned with peeling rainbow stickers and reinstalled it in my bedroom.
“Hang up, Mom!” I hollered. “Mom, did you hang up?”
“Bye, Dawn, honey,” said my mother. “It was so nice talking to you. Come over one night for dinner.”
“Hey, Lillian, want to go get coffee?” asked Dawn, dispensing with opening chitchat. “I have a babysitter. There’s a hip new place that opened on Route 10 called Cuppa Joe. Hip for our town, I mean. Why don’t I pick you up?”
I felt a little sheepish that I was so available. Then again, I had nothing else to do, so in ten minutes I found myself waiting outside in my parents’ driveway for Dawn to pick me up in an enormous red SUV. “Just push all that stuff aside,” she said cheerfully. “There’s no point in trying to keep the car clean with two kids. If you want a snack, there’re some squashed Cheerios on the floor. I’ve got raisins, too. Hey, you could make trail mix.”
There looked to be a forty-ounce cup of coffee already wedged into her SUV’s cup holder. “Did you already have something to drink?” I asked. “We could go somewhere else.”
“Oh, no,” she said, laughing. “That was a couple of hours ago. It’s worn off already.” She sighed. “It is so nice to get away from those kids. You know what my oldest did this morning? I put out a bowl of strawberries, and he took a bite out of each one. I had turned my back for a second. It’s like they invent ways to make you lose your mind. So I cut away the bitten parts and made the biggest strawberry smoothie you ever saw.”
Cuppa Joe had mismatched chairs and a few deliberately worn couches. We ordered some lattes and took a seat.
Dawn leaned forward. “Lillian. You’re going to the reunion, right?”
“I think I am.” Of course I was going. “Are you?”
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t miss it! Everyone’s coming!” I thought about her small group of friends who seemed to gravitate toward one another out of necessity. They were always having boisterous fun in a conspicuous way that struck me as slightly defensive. “I just can’t wait to see what everyone looks like. I run into a couple of people who live nearby, but that’s about it.” She brightened. “Have you kept in touch with Christian?”
I fluttered my hand vaguely. “No, we lost contact years ago.”
“Well, you know he’s going, right? You remember my older brother Jim? He works at the same investment firm as Geordie. They’re both in finance. Geordie said that Christian is moving back from London and he’s definitely going.”
I felt as if I had downed my latte in one gulp. If I took one sip of coffee, I’d be sick.
“London, huh?” I let it hang there. I couldn’t believe I was getting my information from Dawn.
“I guess he was working for an ad agency?” she said, wrinkling her brow. “No, wait, I think it’s a branding agency. I’m not really sure what it was, but Jim says it keeps getting into trouble because they’re sort of avant-garde. I don’t know.”
I assembled my face into a casually disinterested look. “Does he have kids?” That way I could find out if he had a wife without asking outright.
“No, he never got married.” She slurped her coffee. “He was engaged, apparently, but they broke it off. Her name was Saskia, I think.” Dawn went on, chattering about various classmates, but I wasn’t listening. I had not seen him in eighteen years. He was single. Saskia. I had never met an unattractive woman named Saskia. Actually I had never met a Saskia. People like me do not have friends named Saskia. I pictured Christian and Saskia living in some cute flat in Clerkenwell. She probably rode her bike to her job at an art gallery. I imagined them walking their Shiba Inu together in Regent’s Park.
Dawn was staring at me. “Lillian? Are you okay? Listen, I had an idea. We should go to the reunion together! We could get a drink beforehand. Or maybe a couple of drinks! What do they call it? Dutch courage?”
I snapped into focus. “Great idea,” I said automatically. “I don’t know what the deal is, I mean, Sandy’s coming to town and I’m not sure what her plans are, but I think that sounds good.”
Halfway through my cagey speech, she was already nodding energetically. “Sure, yeah, of course. I might have to go with Barbara Karpinski anyway.”
“No, no,” I said. “Let’s go together, sure.” I wanted to talk more about Christian. “You know,” I said quietly, leaning forward, “to tell you the truth, I’m really looking forward to seeing Christian. He was the last intense relationship I had before I met my husband.”
She grinned. “And now you both are single! Lillian, I’m not kidding, you look better now than when we were in high school. It’s totally sick.” On safer ground, we chatted and laughed for a while, and then Dawn looked at her watch.
“I should go. I have to pick up my son at preschool. Or as he calls it, ‘pweschool.’” She sighed. “I used to make fun of kids like that, before I had one.”
Dawn actually had a good sense of humor. I felt a rush of affection for her. “Hey, Dawn,” I said impulsively as we walked to her car. “Do you ever go running?”
“You mean like jogging?” She smiled sheepishly. “Not really. How come?”
“Well, I’m always at the high school track around nine, so I thought you might want to join me. But no big deal.”
She smiled. “I’m normally eating my breakfast burrito around then, but okay, why not? Running. I’ll give it a try. You’ll be there tomorrow?” With the reunion looming, I most certainly would.
That evening, I was too jittery to sleep. I lay in the darkness, staring at the outline of the tulip tree at my bedroom window. In the past few days I had barely given Adam a thought. After a restive hour I sat up and flicked on the light, startled for a moment by my image in the dressing-table mirror. I was wearing my old faded blue flannel Lanz nightgown that I had once saved my babysitting money to get, and my hair was in a ponytail. Why were those sexless granny gowns so popular in the eighties? I peered at the mirror. Dawn was right: I hadn’t changed, really. My once chubby cheeks had sunken, which was essentially a good thing because it lent the illusion of cheekbones. In the eighties my bushy eyebrows resembled two pieces of duct tape and would have humbled Leonid Brezhnev, but with pared brows my face looked more delicate. Yes, the naso-labial folds were beginning to droop, but I didn’t yet have full-on “monkey mouth,” as Kimmy called it.
I sat at my desk and opened the lower left-hand drawer, the last one to be inspected. I picked up a navy Bermuda bag cover, and then some sort of brown, fuzzy item. I examined it, puzzled. It was a tiny braid of hair. Of course Steve DiBenedetto had grown it, ’Til Tuesday style, and then had ceremoniously cut it off one night at a party as we surrounded him
and chanted. At the end of the night I had filched it and slipped it into my purse.
At the time, I remember wishing mightily that I had the nerve to grow a similar tiny braid. What cultural forces had conspired to make me think it ever looked hip? I shuddered, tossed the mangy wisp into the trash, and commenced rummaging. Surely there was something else I could excavate. I pulled the drawer out of the dresser and sat cross-legged on the floor.
A crumpled letter: one of only two that Christian had sent me from Boston College. I smoothed it out carefully.
Everything is great here except my living situation. One of my roommates is cool but the other is having trouble with his girlfriend and he talks about it nonstop. Typical conversation: Dork: “Christian, I need your advice, should I be mad at her? Why do I feel this way?” Me: “I don’t know, man.” Dork: “Should I wait to call her? Should I play it cool, or…”
AAHH, I’m gonna flip out! Thank God I know some cool kids, even if they are not completely my style. None of them make me laugh the way that Mildew and those guys did but we’ve been having a good time and they’re definitely different. This guy Greg had a bottle of ether at a party and I tried it. You inhale it. It’s sort of medicinal. This other dude, Basilio, that I play soccer with asked me to join his band.
In short order, Christian managed to assemble an international cast of hipsters around him. Meanwhile at Ithaca I had three friends named Jen and two Cindis.
And I’ve been taking a lot of photos, remember that old camera that I have of my dad’s, and I met this girl who works in a gallery and she says I have a shot at exhibiting a few things so that would be cool.
My heart still twisted when I read that, imagining a pale art chick with an asymmetrical haircut and electric-blue eyeliner.
Saw Lloyd Cole at this great dive called the Basement, also the Cult. You can do so much here in one weekend: see some African art or there’s this old theater that shows European films from the 50s and 60s, I just feel like I will never catch up, you know? And I like having no real obligations to anyone, and ordering out at 2 a.m.
