Don't You Forget About Me

by Jancee Dunn

  Maybe I could come see you at some point.

  He never did. He came home the first summer but spent each successive one working in Boston. I had heard that he was a bartender at the Basement during his senior summer. I could picture him behind the bar, with his arms folded, his face unreadable, jerking his chin slightly in lieu of saying “What can I get you”? He would look slightly bored, as if he would rather be anywhere else than behind this bar where hordes of silky-haired girls competed to coax from him one of his rare smiles. Then he would close down the bar and walk home alone.

  Of course, he wouldn’t be alone. Even my relentlessly inventive imagination couldn’t conjure that last part.

  I was bursting to talk to someone about Christian. Vi? She would just dispense old-fashioned advice about stalking off in a huff if Christian “got fresh.” (“Get up immediately,” I imagined her saying, “and tell him, ‘You obviously misinterpreted the sort of girl I am. Good night, sir.’”) And Ginny never understood my fascination with Christian. Nor could I consult any of my New York friends, who would hector me to complete my “mourning process.” What I needed was someone who wouldn’t use the term process, as either a noun or a verb. I was tired of crying in the shower, and if this reunion got me over my divorce, so be it.

  My parents were long gone, on their way to a remote garden-supply store near the Pennsylvania border that carried the latest squirrel-proof bird feeder. The drive was an hour and twenty minutes each way, so they had packed sandwiches the night before for the journey. My parents had unsuccessfully battled squirrels with weight-activated feeders, feeders that emitted ultraviolet light, squirrel spinners, and dome-topped feeders. This new one, my father excitedly told me, delivered a powerful electric current that fried any creature over six ounces. By next week, if all went well, there would be a neat pile of crisped squirrel corpses beneath the feeder.

  There must be someone I could talk to about Christian. I felt a crazy impulse to call Trish at J. Crew. Trish wouldn’t judge. I grabbed a catalog from my mother’s catalog basket. After she retired, baskets began sprouting up all over the house in little groups like crocus flowers: baskets of remote controls, baskets for slippers, decorative baskets full of decorative stone balls.

  I dialed the number and in a businesslike voice asked for Trish, explaining that I had a customer-service question.

  “Hello-welcome-to-J.-Crew-my-name-is-Trish-how-can-I-help-you-today.”

  “Oh, hi, Trish.” I cleared my throat. “This is Lillian Curtis. I placed an order last week, and—”

  “I’d-be-happy-to-help-you-what-was-the-order-number.”

  “I don’t know if you remember, but I was the one who moved back home, and I’m turning thirty-eight, and—”

  “Oh, yeah! I remember,” she said, suddenly casual. “How are you?”

  I warmed to the enthusiasm in her voice. “Doing fine, except my high school reunion is coming up soon and I don’t know what to wear.” The truth was that I was going to pull out some of my New York designer clothes, but I needed a hook.

  “Well, we have a great black dress with an A-line skirt, it fits everybody real well because it’s simple, but the fabric is heavy, a nice silk satin, fully lined. It flies out of here.”

  “Mm. Uh-huh,” I said, pretending to consider.

  “Is it formal, or semiformal, or what? You can do separates, like a stretch chino skirt in black with our new ruffle cardigan. Always black, right? Shaves off the pounds.”

  “I’m definitely going to need to look good,” I said. “My old boyfriend is going to be there, the one that I pined after for years. And he’s single now.”

  She snorted. “Listen, I went to my reunion a few years ago, and you never saw so many big stomachs and bald heads. Prepare yourself, is all I’m saying.”

  “No, I have it on good authority that he looks great.” I hesitated. “I’m a little embarrassed by how excited I am. I keep thinking he’s the one that got away, but I was a teenager, for God’s sake. He was perfect for me then, but I was a different person.”

  “I married my high school sweetheart. We met junior year.” I pictured her living in a house in Lynchburg, Virginia, near J. Crew’s headquarters. I wanted to ask her if she had a long commute to 1 Ivy Crescent but reconsidered, thinking it might give her the creeps.

  “…and are you really a different person, deep down?” she was saying. “You’re always yourself, inside, don’t you think? I still feel like I did when I was ten years old, in a way. Sometimes I forget, and then I look in the mirror and I see a tired old hag and I can’t believe it.” She lowered her voice. “Supervisor’s coming.” Then she resumed her chipper demeanor. “Would you like to open a J. Crew credit card? You get ten percent off your first purchase.” Then she resumed her normal voice. “I don’t get it. So what’s the problem?”

  “I feel like people are going to think I’m regressing. Like it’s a step down. Or more like a step back.”

  “Who is this jury of people?” she said indignantly. “You know what? When I think of what ‘they’ will say, I always try not to bunch them in a big group. Makes me anxious. Who are you really thinking of? To me, it’s less scary if you break it down to actual human beings instead of a big gang of people.”

  I thought of two friends from New York who tended to be harsh: Jina, my old neighbor, a cynical yoga teacher who dispelled the beatific yogi image, and Nate, my fellow producer on Vi’s show. I knew exactly what Nate would say: Honey, the day I left high school in Leavenworth was the happiest day of my life. I haven’t thought of those people in years, until I saw Children of the Corn and it brought me right back.

  “Well, there are two people,” I said.

  “That’s it? Two? Who are these two people whose opinions mean so much to you?” I thought of Jina’s estrangement from her family and of Nate’s daily morning announcement when he arrived at work: God, I loathe everyone.

  “Girlfriend,” she began. I cringed a little at that. “There are only three people whose opinions matter to me, and that’s me, myself, and I. Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way. Think about all the bad decisions you would have made if you had listened to the bozos around you, giving out their free advice. Which, by the way, they probably don’t even take themselves.” She laughed sharply.

  Gratitude flooded me. “Thank you, Trish. And I’ll think about the dress.”

  “Okay, then. And if you decide on something else to wear, let me know how the reunion went, anyhow. Call me next Tuesday, when our cashmere cable crewnecks are on sale.”

  chapter fourteen

  Vi had done it again. Somehow the woman had persuaded me to take a three-hour train ride to visit her, laughingly dismissing my protests that I had a lot of prep work to do for the reunion.

  “You can’t spare one evening? What, you don’t miss your old chum? There’s a noon train tomorrow. I’ll have the housekeeper freshen up the guest room, and Mrs. P can make that tuna noodle casserole you like, with the crushed potato chips on top. And how about some of her heavenly butterscotch pudding? Isn’t that one of your favorites?”

  So there I was, obediently taking the noon train to the immaculate, moneyed village in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where Vi had moved with her third husband, Morty, during the Reagan administration. When he died, she decided to stay, even though she claimed she would always be a “city girl.” Some of its more buttoned-up residents regularly left Vi anonymous notes in her mailbox, scolding her for the excessive holiday decorations on her lawn, the explosion of orange and yellow gladiolas that lined her driveway, the show tunes she blasted on Saturday mornings. She would just shrug it off with a laugh.

  I hadn’t seen Vi in over a month, and I found, suddenly, that I missed my old chum very much indeed, and when a taxi deposited me at the foot of her long driveway and I saw a tiny figure on the porch with outstretched arms, I nearly broke into a stumbling run.

  “Lillian!” she cried, bustling me into the house as her two fat corgi
dogs yapped in circles around my feet and Mrs. P emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling. “We have your room all ready,” she announced, leading me into the spare bedroom where I habitually stayed for our “pajama parties,” as Vi termed them. A set of crisp pink pajamas lay on the bed, a pair of new terry slippers on the rug. Vi liked to provide everything to spare me the indignity of lugging a big suitcase. On the bedside table the housekeeper had placed a small vase of white roses and a dish of pastel Jordan almonds.

  “When I’m a guest, I panic if there’s not a little snack around,” Vi explained. “Just a little nibble to keep the blood sugar up.” She grabbed her middle. “Although I should probably lay off the sweet stuff. No, that’s not true. I’m a big-boned girl, and that’s that. I think if you carry your clothing well, that’s really half the battle.”

  Today’s ensemble was a fluttery dark pink caftan with a starburst pattern (she called it a “hostess robe”), black palazzo pants, and black slippers with rhinestone-encrusted buckles. In the ten years I had known her, I had never seen her bare feet. Her hair was swirled into its customary pouf, and she had pinned a large rhinestone bow in the back.

  “I’m so happy to see you, my dear,” she said. “Do you like the caftan? Isn’t it the exact color of a hibiscus flower? I was in a Caribbean mood.” She grabbed my shoulders and began inspecting me. “You’re still too thin, but Mrs. P can fatten you up.” She squinted at me so closely that I saw my own reflection in her enormous round glasses. “Your eyes are a little brighter. What’s going on? Let’s dish!”

  “I’ll tell you over dinner,” I said. I knew she was bursting to relay all of the gossip from the show. She led me over to an enormous peach-colored sectional sofa, and we both plopped down on it with a sigh. I loved everything in her house. It was a demented combination of Boca retirement home (shepherdess figurines, silk flower arrangements), Connecticut WASP (needlepoint pillows, chintz, dog prints), and seventies disco (Nagel prints of hollow-cheeked women, gleaming walls of mirror.)

  “Morty preferred a more masculine look,” she said, looking around contentedly. “He loved his dark furniture and heavy curtains. When he passed, I realized that the décor really wasn’t me. So when the fog lifted a little, the first thing I did was have my bedroom painted shell pink—it looks so much like the color of a petit four that my friends swear that just looking at the walls is fattening! And I dusted off my collection of figurines and little objets d’art that Morty couldn’t abide, and I put them all over the house.” She leaned back on a needlepoint pillow that said FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU. FOOL ME TWICE, PREPARE TO DIE, a Klingon proverb (Vi was a closet Star Trek fan).

  “Now my house is a place of calm and lightness and fun,” she said. “It says that I am confident in my own tastes, and if my taste isn’t out of Architectural Digest, well, too darn bad.” Mrs. P hurried in with a big bowl of artichoke dip and a silver tray of crackers. I settled in happily as Vi gave me the rundown on all of the show’s goings-on: One well-known old action star had shown up to the set “with a face-lift that was so bad, his ears were practically fastened on top of his head. Lillian, don’t laugh, I am very serious.” And Vi had gotten in a tiff with her friend Arlene, the TV actress whose heyday was in the fifties, when she co-hosted The Consolidated Oil Comedy Hour. “It really might be over this time,” Vi said with a dismissive wave. “Arlene told me she was going to move to a nursing home, to, as she put it, ‘slow down and finish her days in peace.’ I told her if she took care of herself and laid off the after-dinner cognac that she likes to drink to excess, she could live another thirty years! That’s hardly chump change. Then she tells me that her daughter said it was a good thing to do. The idea! I said to Arlene, ‘Is this the same daughter that bought you a funeral plot for your birthday? She’s practically pushing you into the coffin!’ Well. She didn’t like that.”

  I shook my head. “Jesus, Vi. Do you filter anything?”

  “Someone has to tell the truth to these old crows. It’s nonsense to shut your ears and live in a world of make-believe. This is not Fantasy Island.” She placed a fat yellow throw pillow on the coffee table and propped her feet up on it. “Now. Tell me why you have that flush to your cheeks.”

  I relayed the whole story of Christian, while she nodded intently. Telling Vi any sort of long tale was entertaining because you could see her constant struggle not to break in with her own stories. Her eyes blazed when I talked of my crying jags, and I knew she was itching to supply a corresponding saga of her own divorces, but she admirably held back. Anything that had to do with overcoming adversity reliably produced her own tale of triumph.

  When I finished, she said, “Well, why shouldn’t you have a fling with this Christian? I say that you should go for it. Hook up with him.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “How do you know that expression?”

  “I know people hook up these days, Lillian. I’m not a fossil.”

  I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t looking for a mere fling, so I cued her to talk about her own dating adventures. She had been divorced twice (Barry, Alvin) and widowed once (Morty) but was unapologetic about wanting a fourth husband.

  “Ugh,” she said dramatically. “Doris set me up with a man who looked like a plucked chicken. I’m a big woman, Lillian, with a big personality, and frankly, I need a big man. Which I have told Doris repeatedly. This one looked like he had just crawled out of a crypt. He had on an old suit, and he had obviously shrunk since he bought it, so it gapped around him and didn’t fit properly. Worst of all, he was unable to converse. I wanted to ask him, ‘Did somebody forget to plug you in tonight?’” She shook her head. “I can spot a certain sort of widower a mile off. I can’t count the number of men who get older and lose touch with their friends as their wives become their entire world. Then their wives die and they have completely lost their social skills. Well. I raced through dinner, even though it gave me indigestion. Too bad. And he was a physicist, too. You know how I love the sciences.”

  I had never heard one thing about her love for “the sciences.”

  “But I persevere. I’m not settling for a man just because he’s breathing.” She brightened. “Ooh, Mrs. P, you have outdone yourself!” She clapped as Mrs. Postiga grandly set down a huge sterling silver dish that overflowed with tuna casserole and set up two TV trays in front of us. Vi fervently believed that everyone should use good silverware and dishes every day.

  From her 1985 autobiography,

  Who Says There Are No Second Acts?

  I know people who have driven shabby cars their whole lives, but when they die, their hearse is a limousine. Why not take a trip in that limousine while you’re alive and can enjoy it? Get out the good dishes that you inherited from your grandmother and use them to serve pigs in blankets! Don’t deny yourselves for that “rainy day.” Open that bottle of champagne this instant! Any day can provide an excuse to be festive. When I watch the Academy Awards, I put on a colorful dress and high heels, even if I am alone.

  I’ll make a confession. Do you know what else I do sometimes? I run down the driveway in the morning to fetch the newspaper dressed only in my pajamas. It’s a little game that I play with myself. I run as fast as I can, hoping the neighbors won’t spot me. Then I rush into my house, giggling like a crazy lady. Let them think I’m nuts. I don’t care! Better that than a soda pop without the fizz.

  Vi popped in a video of Singin’ in the Rain, our traditional entertainment as we ate dinner on the TV trays. Then, as Mrs. P cleared everything away, Vi and I changed into our pajamas for a little “girl talk.” “You know,” said Vi, using her lower-octave “candid, confiding” voice, when we had returned to the couch, “the two of us have a lot in common. We’re both back on the dating scene. Last week I was talking to my friend Joan—you’ve met her, the decorator for Lady Bird Johnson? I was telling her about my difficulties in finding a good man, and she said to me, ‘Vi, I just can’t identify with your troubles. You are beloved by fa
ns all over the globe. You have preserved both your face and your figure. You have a uniformed chauffer to take you wherever you need. You…”

  Never had I heard sedate Joan rhapsodize in this manner, and who uses the words “uniformed chauffeur” in normal conversation? I had learned to allow Vi a certain amount of creative license.

  “…But I told Joan that I get anxious just like everyone else.”

  I watched Vi as she relayed her long conversation with Joan. Vi was a self-described “people person” who surrounded herself with a whirl of friends, staffers, and colleagues, but occasionally I detected currents of loneliness. When we were taping her talk show and were between guests, I would observe her from my perch in a dark corner of the set. When she thought no one was watching, it was fascinating to see her face drop the cheerfulness. Then, the moment the cameraman returned from a smoke break, she resumed her bright, expectant expression, as if she were waiting for the punch line of a particularly good joke.

  She never said it outright, but it was clear that she was distant from her two children. Vi portrayed herself as a truth teller whose candid disclosures made her friends gasp in shock, but she was selective in what she chose to reveal. She did admit that both of her kids—from her first husband, Barry—were raised by “nurses” as she energetically pursued her career, and I guessed that the relationships had never fully recovered. I had met Barry Jr. exactly once, and Vi seemed to rarely receive calls from him. He was closer to his father. Vi alluded to an acrimonious divorce from Big Barry, an oil executive whom she had met through her many appearances on The Consolidated Oil Comedy Hour. He had assumed that she would stop working once they had a child, and had sued her for abandonment.

  Barry Jr. was a tech-industry honcho who lived in Sacramento with his wife, Leah, and their two kids. They made grudging visits to Vi at Christmastime, but most of his contact consisted of sending computer pictures of the grandchildren. He was a colorless lump of a man with square-shaped glasses who chided her in a honking voice to act her age.