by Jancee Dunn
Ginny grabbed the glass and held it to the light. “Why throw money away on Fiber Choice?” She turned the faucet on, filled it with an inch of water, and handed to me. “Here you go.”
“Or you could grow Sea-Monkeys in there,” I pointed out.
My mother looked at us over her reading glasses. “You two are horrible to your poor old mother,” she said idly, but I knew she was pleased by any show of unity between Ginny and me. Then she frowned. “Rats. We don’t have green chiles for the enchiladas. I told your father to pick some up.”
“I’ll go,” I said, grabbing an opportunity to conspicuously prove I was helpful.
Ginny ran to the hall closet to get her coat. “I’ll come with you.”
We got into my parents’ car, and when I turned on the ignition, Ginny jumped, startled, as Siouxsee and the Banshees blasted out of the speakers.
“Lillian!” she gasped over the music. “You’re going to ruin your hearing.”
“Come on,” I teased. “Doesn’t it sound good?” She grinned and nodded as we drove to the store. I had gotten back into my old Jersey-girl habit of speeding, and I barreled to the stoplight, stomping hard on the brake at the red light so that Ginny lurched forward.
“You’re driving like you did when you were a teenager,” she said, but she was giggling.
“Speaking of,” I said, eyeing her sideways. “I just have to make a quick stop. I want to go by Christian’s house to see if anyone’s home. I don’t know if he lives here yet or not, but if he’s coming from London, he might show up at his folks’ house before the reunion.”
She folded her arms. “Have you done this before?”
“Are you kidding? Ah, no,” I lied scornfully. “But I thought it would be fun with you.” I braked and turned the car down Linden Lane before she had a chance to protest. “Come on.” I slowed and then parked in front of a neighbor’s house a few yards away. “Indulge me.” We looked toward the Somers home.
She rolled her eyes. “I feel like we’re at a stakeout. I should be wearing a rumpled overcoat and sipping a cup of coffee.” She pretended to answer a cell phone. “Yeah. We’re still here, chief. No sign of the perps.”
I studied the house for signs of life. A black Saab that I didn’t recognize sat in the driveway. “That could be Geordie’s,” I muttered. “Dawn told me that he lives in Morristown, so he’s close enough to come over for dinner. Maybe the whole family has Sunday dinner together.”
Ginny raised her eyebrows. “He didn’t move to the city?”
“No, but he’s raking it in as a hedge-fund manager. He commutes. He married some woman at his firm. I think she stays home now. They have three boys, so they probably need the parents for babysitting duty.”
She nodded, then looked at me slyly. “You know that I fooled around with him once.”
I pretended to do a spit take with our “coffee.” “You what? Ginny! Why didn’t you ever tell me? I need the details right now.” I shook my head wonderingly. “You bagged Geordie Somers? Well.”
She shrugged. “At the time, you were mooning over Christian and I didn’t want you blabbing to him. We kept it a big secret because our little rendezvous was during my senior year, when, if you remember, he was all hot and heavy with Elizabeth.”
“So? What happened?” The house was momentarily forgotten.
“Nothing much. We were at a party. Remember how Brad what’s-his-name had those parties in his dad’s barn? Well, somehow Geordie’s ride left without him and I ended up driving him home.” Ginny never had more than a beer or two at parties, while I had thrown up out of many a car window. “So we’re talking in his driveway—right over there—as the car was running, and we were having a real conversation. I always thought he was okay, but I never got the whole Somers mystique. He used to call himself ‘Geords.’ I mean, you shouldn’t assign yourself a nickname. And I thought all of those lacrosse players were a bit thuggish.”
She thought for a moment. “So he was telling me about how he was a basketball coach at a summer camp and that once a week, he and the other coaches would secretly pick the underdog of the week and manipulate the game so the kid could get the ball and score, to make him look like the jock that he wasn’t. Of course, I was impressed. When you’re seventeen, that passes for sensitive.” She laughed. “And I remember thinking, ‘He really is pretty attractive.’ He was just wearing jeans and an oxford shirt—it was light blue, and the sleeves were rolled up so you could see his forearms, which were really muscular from all the tennis he played in the summer. And he had the curly hair and the blue eyes, and that big, sexy Roman nose. He had the sort of soft look that teenage boys don’t have now. All the girls in my classes go for shaved heads and tattoos.”
I flashed to the parking lot at Brendan Byrne Arena where a group of kids from my school had gathered before a Dead show to tailgate. Geordie, wearing an artfully faded yellow polo shirt and perfectly worn-in Levi’s with a small tear at the knee, which exposed a smooth, tan expanse of skin, was flipping burgers on a hibachi and laughing. His sun-streaked hair blew around his face. What freedom it was to be a good-looking boy at that age.
“When he stopped telling me about basketball camp,” Ginny continued, “he just looked at me, and there was that wonderful moment of tension. And then he kissed me, and it was just…I couldn’t form a thought. For probably the first time, my mind was completely blank because there was no room for anything but…but pleasure.” She smiled and sat back in the car seat. “You know, it’s funny. I think that when a man looks back on the most erotic moment of his life, it usually involves a deviation from the norm—some sort of druggy three-way he lucked into in college, or the slightly nuts girl that would let him do anything he wanted. But when women think back on that electric, definitive moment, it’s never anything particularly kinky. Right? Often it’s nothing more than making out on a couch or in somebody’s car.” She waved her hand absently. “I suppose men are more prone to thrill seeking and would value those moments as episodic frames. It reinforces the idea that you take risks.”
“Ginny,” I interrupted. “We’re not in class here.”
She shook her head impatiently. “I know, I know. But I’ve often wondered about the significance of these memories, if for men it’s an artifact of sensation-seeking behavior, the way they put up a sports trophy or a photo of them deep-sea fishing or something.” She tented her fingers, which she did when was floating away on a wave of theory. “Whereas women are more inner-directed. Maybe a make-out session satisfies some vision of intimacy on their own terms rather than a socially constructed vision of what constitutes an erotic encounter.”
I made snoring noises. “Please,” I said, “get back to Geordie. What happened afterward?”
She frowned a little. “You know, nothing, really. At school the next week, he was back with Elizabeth, and our whole encounter was basically forgotten. But it’s funny—over the years, I must confess that I’ve thought about it a lot, that funny little throwaway night. He would hold my eyes a little bit longer when we were all out together, like we shared a private joke. But it’s not like I was in love with him. We just had that chemistry, I guess.”
I sat up, rigid, and pointed toward the house. “There’s some action,” I said in a low voice. A toddler had opened the front door. The top of his head was just visible over the windowed storm door, along with two small hands that banged on the glass. Ginny and I watched silently as the child reached repeatedly for the latch. Suddenly he got it open and shot outside, crowing with victory and lurching down the front lawn to the street.
“I can’t let this happen,” said Ginny, unbuckling her seat belt, but then the door flew open and a harassed-looking man ran after the kid and deftly scooped him up. He was scolding the giggling boy at first, but then he chuckled.
“It’s Geordie,” I whispered. He was clad in navy track pants and a T-shirt, and his once curly hair had been cropped short to expose a hairline that was in retreat but still holding steady. He was ta
ll and trim and fit, but in the lacquered, overly cut way of a personal trainer. He held the chubby kid easily in one arm.
“He’s too slick,” she said dismissively.
I whipped around to look at her. “You mean to tell me that your heart isn’t beating faster right now?”
She considered. “It is, but it may be more of a reaction of recognition than any sort of romantic feeling. I’m glad he doesn’t look terrible, but if I met him right now, I wouldn’t be attracted to him. I can just picture him at the strip club with his fellow hedge-fund managers. And then off to a two-hour game of racquetball. ‘Work hard, play hard.’” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d rather have my memory. I don’t need to update it.”
Meanwhile, my heart was thumping with almost painful force.
Ginny lightly punched my arm. “Okay, you got your sighting. Shall we go? The folks are probably wondering what happened to us.”
I just could not seem to pull her in. Sighing, I started the car.
The next morning I was the first one up, so I commandeered the family computer to check our class website. Aha. There were a few fresh entries in Classmate Updates. Our resident goth chick, Michelle Brennan, a blank-faced girl with lank black hair and a tattered cape who glided balefully down the halls, had so thoroughly embraced suburban motherhood that her e-mail address was Sippycup3. “My husband and I are the proud new parents of beautiful twin daughters, Madison and Olivia, who join their big sister in keeping me real busy!” she wrote. “Caring for them is a true labor of love. Come and visit me if you ever get to Dallas, y’all!” She had posted a photo of the girls but none of herself.
Why did every other person feel compelled to mention how busy and overbooked they were? And what could I possibly write? I keep idle with a full roster of daytime television, Internet surfing, and lingering visits to big-box stores to buy nothing in particular. Suddenly I turn around and it’s dinnertime!
Mildew had also weighed in with a terse assessment of his life. “Grad school—got MBA then did a stint at IBM. Five years at Citigroup, then settled in Randolph, NJ. Started adult day-care facility with brother-in-law in PA. Also moved into development two years ago, currently building townhomes in Union County.” Well. Mildew was certainly two tons of fun. Christian’s giggling sidekick had turned into an adult day-care-facility mogul. No mention of a personal life.
At the end of their postings, many in the class had gamely filled out a multiple-choice quiz provided by the website and designed, apparently, to foster harmony, because every person answered in the same way. What do you do with your free time? Dine with friends, go to movies, sports or strenuous activity. Your favorite type of movie: Comedy, Action/Adventure. Your biggest pet peeve: Sitting in traffic. If you won $100 million tomorrow, you would: Quit my job. Your main source of current events: TV. Your dream vacation: Anywhere warm!!!
I snapped to attention. Kimmy had posted a profile. She and I had kept in sporadic touch, but our last exchange had been a few years back. Kimmy had married a Florida shopping-mall developer and had four children. I inspected her photo. She was sitting in a deck chair at some island resort, or maybe it was her Palm Beach country club, looking tan and rich and wearing spotless white jeans and a brown printed halter top. Her hair was chicly slicked back; her tawny shoulders glowed. She was surrounded by four handsome boys with perfectly tousled haircuts.
Maybe she had written me, too. I checked my e-mail and saw messages from both her and Lynn.
“Hi, Lily,” Kimmy wrote. “Can’t wait to see you. Do you believe I put that picture up? Look at those wrinkles. Honestly, need to keep out of the sun!!! The bigger question is, how did I get four boys? When did that happen? We must catch up ahead of time. Let’s all spend the day together before the reunion. Lynn says she’s in, too. Have you talked to Sandy? How is Adam? Are you pregnant yet?”
Kimmy had always tossed around words like hag and whale when she described herself. I felt a little frisson of jealousy that she and Lynn had already planned to do something beforehand. Did they keep in regular touch? Did their families get together for vacations? Lynn lived in Richmond with her husband and was a horseback-riding instructor.
The irony was that if I’d wanted to, I could have kept in touch with them, too. Whenever I e-mailed Kimmy, I received an enthusiastic note back. So why did I feel jealous? I had already heard from Sandy, and they hadn’t. It was the same petty envy that I felt when I used to sneak glances at the calendar that hung on Kimmy’s bedroom door. She used to write down all of her social engagements, most of which went on without my knowledge. One Saturday would involve “Mall with Laurie 11 am,” “Eddie and the Cruisers with Karen @ 2, Susan’s house 7 for sleepover, don’t forget to bring her Ton Sur Ton shirt back.” I would shrivel with the knowledge that I was the 5 P.M. lacrosse-drill slot, Kimmy’s briefest commitment.
I checked Lynn’s e-mail. It was written four minutes after Kimmy’s, so they had obviously chatted on the phone beforehand. Did they say anything bad about me? Had the word gotten out that I was Taking a Break? There was no reason for me to be uneasy. They were my friends. I could call them right now if I wanted to and they would be genuinely glad to hear from me.
“LIL!” Lynn had written. Lynn was a little looser than the serenely composed Kimmy. “Are you feeling as old as I am? Twenty years ago, we were going to the prom. (Why did you let me wear that hideous black dress?)” Her dress was an elegant sleeveless sheath that she wore with her grandmother’s simple diamond pendant, while mine was a peach-colored explosion of puffy sleeves, lace, and enough spangles to shame a rodeo clown.
“Still in Richmond,” her note continued. “Michael and I just love it and we’re very involved in the community. Still a riding instructor, I have a great crop of kids this year. The parents are a little much, but I can handle it. Remember how I tried to take you riding with me once and how scared you were of the horses? I’ve attached a pic of me on Senator, I’m madly in love with him. Call me if you want to talk before the reunion, ok? Oh and: no husbands, right? What are you wearing?”
At the bottom of the e-mail there was a photo of Lynn in riding gear perched atop an enormous black horse. She was slim and fit and wore no makeup, her blond hair caught in a smooth low ponytail. Over the years she had sent many photos of herself and Michael rappelling down some mountain range or riding bikes at the bottom of a canyon, interchangeable in their aerodynamic black racing gear, always accompanied by one line that identified the location and another line that mentioned how crazy they were. “Here we are free-climbing Cortina in the Dolomites (some of it completely vertical!) Are we insane or what??!’”
I debated writing a post about myself on Classmate News. Surely Christian would check out the site at least once. Was it uncool to put up a bulletin? Well, Kimmy had done it.
Hi from New York. Bold! A lie in the very first line! I’m on my tenth year as a producer on Tell Me Everything! With Vi Barbour, and it continues to be a blast. No. Revise. I would not lift any words from a beer commercial. Every single classmate post contained the word blast. Our entire class was in the midst of a nonstop blast…. and each week is different from the last. I’m enjoying the city (museums, theater) and travel frequently. Get some culture in there, but don’t overdo it. Just got back from Tulum, Mexico. Three years ago. Training for the NY marathon. I was in decent enough shape that I could fake it. Single after an amicable divorce. That seemed sufficiently adult.
Ginny appeared at the door. “Morning,” she said in her scratchy just-woken-up voice. “Come have coffee with me.” She was wearing crisp white pajamas and soft ballet slippers. Ginny always looked freshly showered. I made a mental note to buy ballet slippers after she left to wear around the house. “Why are you on the computer so early?”
“I’m just looking on our class website,” I said, shutting down both her and the computer. We went down to the kitchen and Ginny loaded coffee into my parents’ temperamental machine. She took a deep sniff of the grounds.
“Don’t you love the smell of coffee?” she said. “Even bad coffee, like this stuff.” My mother’s feeble half-decaf blend kept me in a fugue state all day.
She got out two mugs and placed them neatly by the coffee machine, both handles pointing in the same direction. “So I’m assuming you’re excited about the reunion?” she said from over her shoulder.
I grinned. “I kind of am.”
She turned around. “Can I ask you something?” Whenever a person requested permission to ask me something, I got tense. It’s never a question like How about some jelly beans? or Do you know what your best quality is? or Don’t you just love puppies?
She fixed her unblinking stare on me and leaned against the kitchen counter, her arms folded. “I notice that you’re romanticizing this time period a little bit,” she said. “I don’t recall you having this spectacular time in high school. In fact, I remember you crying a lot in your room with the door shut.”
I shook my head. “I had a great time. It may have been the best period of my life, in some ways. You know what it was, maybe? The highs were higher than they have ever been since. It’s as if I’ve been trying to capture that first high, the way a crack addict does.”
“And if you remember, the lows were suicidally low,” she said. “Lillian. When something was bothering you, sometimes you wouldn’t talk for a week. Remember?”
I thought for a minute. “You might be right,” I admitted. “But I don’t understand why you’re not sentimental about high school. You had a much easier go of it than I did.” Ginny was nominated for homecoming queen but had politely refused it, which was interpreted as edgy rather than principled and made her even more popular.
She frowned. The theoretical wheels were turning. “For me, high school was a crude caste system made up of fleeting social ties among hormonally excited teens.” Her hand sketched a vague circle in the air. “And why those ties would create anything meaningful twenty years later is beyond me.”
