by Jancee Dunn
Kimmy deftly executed an elephant-trunk pose. “Listen,” she said. “Have a fun night with him, fool around—”
“Tell us everything,” Lynn put in.
“And then go back to New York, start dating again, and meet someone nice.”
I smiled enigmatically. Christian would not be some fling.
chapter twenty
Later that night, when Kimmy and Lynn had retired to their room and Sandy was snoring softly in her bed next to me, I lay awake thinking of Kimmy. The sight of her yoga flexing hurtled me back to one summer in high school, when she and I attended a weeklong soccer camp at Dartmouth, the closest I would ever get to those particular hallowed halls.
Because it was July, we were able, thrillingly, to stay in an actual dorm. For weeks we had excitedly made plans to live like real college students, buying food for the mini-fridge and flip-flops for the shower. Kimmy’s older brother had schooled us on exactly what to bring and had even helped us steal a milk crate from the deli. We weren’t exactly sure what the crate was supposed to store, but according to him, every dorm room had one, so we wanted one, too.
Every day after soccer practice, we would walk home to Kimmy’s house, carefully honing the lies that we were going to tell the college boys we met. We crafted elaborate biographies, rehearsed over and over: We were students who had just completed our freshman year at Duke, but Dartmouth was offering dorm space to us—this revealed our utter naïveté—while we considered transferring schools. I was from Charlottesville, Virginia, and lived on a horse farm, while Kimmy hailed from D.C. and lived in a townhouse in Georgetown. We both had boyfriends but made it clear to them that we wanted to be free for the summer. (That way, if we didn’t like our potential suitors, a “reunion” with our boyfriends offered a convenient out.)
We bought decorations for our temporary dorm-room walls that we thought were sufficiently collegiate and would impress older guys—a Bob Marley poster that said “Smile Jamaica,” a still of a deranged Jack Nicholson poking his head through a chain-locked door in The Shining, an ad for Corona beer (exotic to us because it was drunk with a lime). Kimmy’s brother had grudgingly supplied a few tattered album covers to display—Flesh for Lulu, Ministry, and Tom Waits. Mrs. Marino, getting caught up in the festivities, drove us to Bloomingdale’s and had us pick out matching Marimekko bedspreads. We carefully avoided babyish florals, finally selecting a grown-up pattern in an understated dark red.
On the big day, Dr. and Mrs. Marino drove us to Dartmouth, stopping first in New Haven so Dr. Marino could take us to the pizza place that he loved to frequent when he attended Yale. When we arrived at the dorm room, we took our milk crates and hurried the two of them off, Mrs. Marino crying and Dr. Marino slipping Kimmy a one-hundred-dollar bill. “And you have the Amex, right?” Dr. Marino said absently. “Just don’t go crazy. And buy your brother a sweatshirt.”
We busily unpacked and ornamented the room, turning on our boom box and locating the college radio station, as Kimmy’s brother had instructed. Then my heart thudded in excitement as Kimmy grabbed the keys. “Let’s walk around,” she said. We left our door open a crack to announce our arrival, in case any guys happened by. We explored the entire campus, me surreptitiously studying every face that we passed, Kimmy cool and inscrutable in her perfectly faded Girbaud jeans and white Mia flats. Then again, she had once visited her brother at Princeton, so she knew exactly what to expect. Nothing fazed Kimmy—not ordering at a posh restaurant, not her first trip to Paris with her family. She knew how to charge things at her parents’ country club and how to carry on conversations with her older brother’s friends. She knew what outfits to wear to graduations and weddings. Dartmouth was certainly no cause for alarm.
We passed the campus store and she pulled me inside. “We’ll need some things to wear,” she said. She grabbed a basket and started digging through a pile of sweatshirts with concentration.
I held one up. “Kimmy. Kimmy. Look at this T-shirt. It says ‘Coed Naked Lacrosse.’”
“No,” she said.
“Stupid,” I agreed, and put it back. She loaded up the basket with Dartmouth sweatshirts, sweatpants, shirts, socks, a tennis visor, and Dartmouth notebooks to use the following year in high school. Then we topped the pile with some junk food—our new favorite drink, Capri Sun, which came in a silver bag, Marathon candy bars, and Kimmy’s favorite gum, Freshen-up in cinnamon, which she called “come gum” because each fat capsule contained a blob of viscous goo in the middle.
“Thanks, Dad,” Kimmy said as she paid. I laughed conspiratorially even as I was a little horrified at how much merchandise she unthinkingly bought. The chubby clerk who rang it all up was only a few years older than us, and new at the job.
“Oops,” said the clerk apologetically. “I have to deduct this. I rang it up twice by mistake. It’ll just take a minute.”
Kimmy looked freezingly at her and didn’t say anything. I wanted to smile sympathetically but was afraid Kimmy would see me. That was the queasy feeling she often elicited in me. My part of our covenant was that I would roll my eyes along with her when she encountered a hectoring father or a slow waiter, no matter how much it made me cringe, but in exchange I was permitted to move comfortably through her world. As a shy person I siphoned her confidence, and if I had to act haughty occasionally, I was willing to make that trade.
What I loved about Kimmy was that she pointedly ignored the fact that my father owned a small hardware store so I could ill afford the designer clothes she wore. She would casually hand me some castoffs, some with the tags still attached, and say, “These always looked better on you.” Or she’d buy a sweater and say, “We’ll share this.” Occasionally she would have her mother pick up two of the same item for us. My father would have been mortified if he knew that her parents bought clothes for me.
I wished that I felt the same way, but I didn’t experience a particle of guilt, nor did I feel bad that Kimmy never bothered to come to my house after school. I was happy to go to her house, which had the first Betamax in the neighborhood and an older brother with an extensive album collection and a freezer full of Pepperidge Farm blueberry turnovers that would have been gone at my house in five minutes but languished for months at the Marinos’. Mrs. Marino collected Lladró figurines, which she displayed in a lighted glass case in the living room. I vowed that when I got older, I, too, would collect Lladrós.
The dumpling-shaped Mrs. Marino was so cowed by her glamorous daughter that she—like everyone else—sought to be Kimmy’s friend. She called me her second daughter. When I phoned the Marino home, she made a point of chatting with me for a minute before handing the phone to Kimmy. She cheered me on at field hockey games. Every year she took Kimmy and me out to a special dinner for my birthday. I felt more comfortable around Mrs. Marino than I did with my own mother, so much so that when Kimmy told me one year that she was going to get her parents to invite me along on their annual vacation in Palm Beach, I assumed the biggest problem I’d have would be convincing my own folks to allow me to go away for a whole week.
Kimmy had regaled me many times about the Breakers, the opulent monument to the preppy good life—the hotel staffers who would come out to your beach cabana to spray your face with chilled mineral water, the ten tennis courts, the croquet games on the wide green lawn. It sounded like heaven. “I just have to ask them and it’s done,” she said. “My brother won’t care. He plays golf with my dad the whole time anyway.”
The weekend after Kimmy told me about the trip, I begged my parents to let me go with the Marinos. Forty-eight hours later, after gales of angry, hysterical tears, they agreed, as long as I paid my airfare with the confirmation money my grandparents had given me a few years earlier. When I triumphantly called Kimmy to tell her that at last I had won them over, she said that her parents had just told her the vacation was family only. Her matter-of-fact tone conveyed that she had calmly accepted their verdict without argument. I had deluded myself into thinking that Mrs.
Marino would surely want her “second daughter” along on vacation.
We brought the bags of Dartmouth merchandise back to the dorm room, passing on the way a gang of preppy boys with their Lacoste collars up, all carelessly blond and a little cruel-looking. “Look at the one in front,” I said quietly. “Doesn’t he look exactly like Blane in Pretty in Pink?”
“Totally,” she said.
I pointed at a banner that hung from a dorm room. “‘Free Steve Biko,’” I read aloud. “Who’s Steve Biko?”
Kimmy didn’t answer and we wandered over to a restaurant called Lou’s.
“What should we do now?” I said after we got the bill. “Maybe we should check out the student center. It’s Friday night; maybe some kids are hanging out there.”
She shrugged. “Let’s go back and take showers,” she said.
After we duly toted our buckets with shampoo bottles in them to the showers, we returned to the room. Kimmy put on a pair of underwear and then pulled a cream silk teddy out of her luggage and shimmied it on. She sat down at the desk, which had a mirror propped up against it, and slowly, methodically pulled a brush through her hair.
I was used to this behavior from our sleepovers, in which Kimmy would brush her hair as she talked to us, her eyes never leaving the mirror. I just didn’t expect it here. I slowly got dressed, sneaking a look at Kimmy’s caramel body and how it contrasted with the milky glow of the lingerie and the pale slice of bikini mark that peeped from underneath her thin straps. Her breasts were perfect and seemed to hover near her chin, while my recent and insignificant acquisitions had already earned the nickname “East Westies” from my teammates because they pointed in different directions.
I sat on the bed and waited for her to announce what we were going to do next. “If you’re not into going out,” I ventured, “maybe we could just go get some ice cream and watch some TV.”
She shook her head. “I’m on a diet,” she said mildly as she flexed a brown arm and turned it in various directions.
I waited on the bed for another half an hour, pretending to read a magazine, but she didn’t move. Sometimes we would talk about soccer, or her various crushes, or her attempts to lose weight. Other times she seemed perfectly content to brush her hair in the silence. I wouldn’t dream of challenging her, so I sat on the bed and watched her as she watched herself or lounged fetchingly on the bed. I kept wondering if she was hoping that a college guy would stumble in and catch her in her teddy, but after a while I realized that it wasn’t about me, or a boy walking in. It was about her.
After a few hours, we turned out the light and went to bed. I wondered if she was intimidated by the older kids and too shy to initiate a meeting, burdened with being the leader of our two-girl posse. But as time went on and Kimmy spent each night in her silk teddy, I had the creeping suspicion that it was actually her idea of a good time. Hell, if I had slim brown ankles like hers, I’d be admiring the way they looked in my expensive white scrunch socks, too.
My mother had never warmed to Kimmy, despite my pleas that she get to know her. Granted, during the few times that Kimmy had been to our house in the evenings, she had always been slightly taken aback by the sight of my mother, weary and rumpled after a day of work, eating a bowl of cereal for dinner at the kitchen table without bothering to change out of her suit first. My mother immediately detected Kimmy’s carefully concealed aversion.
“I don’t dislike her,” my mother said once. “I just feel like she isn’t necessarily the kindest person. I see some of the things she says and does, and I feel like karma will get her someday.” But karma never did catch up to Kimmy Marino. She glided through Trinity College, picking up a shopping-mall mogul along the way, produced four beautiful boys, and moved confidently among various environments scented with orange blossoms, Italian leather, lavender, and gin and tonics. Some people do just fine.
chapter twenty-one
The next day I spent an absurd two hours perfecting my casually natural look for the Bethel Rams homecoming game, but when we arrived, there was no sign of Christian. Where are you? I halfheartedly watched the Bethel Rams get pounded by the Chatham Gladiators as I scanned each face in the bleachers. Then we went back to our hotel room to spend another two hours on our more formal look. Somehow, we were all ready at exactly five o’clock, when the cocktail hour commenced.
I was idly putting on another coat of mascara when I remembered with a start that I was supposed to go to the reunion with Dawn. In the day’s excitement I had completely forgotten our plans. “I’m making a quick call!” I yelled to Sandy over our getting-ready music and ducked into the hall.
I dialed her number. She had probably left already. I secretly hoped that she had. Her machine picked up. Thank you, Jesus.
“Hey, Dawn!” I said brightly. “Lily here, how are you? Listen, I know you wanted to go together tonight, but I got a late start and methinks you already left.” “Methinks”? Who says that? And I was talking way too fast. I took a deep breath to slow down. “Anyway, guess I’ll just see you there, okay?” I clicked the phone shut. Done.
I burst back into the room. “I’m not going downstairs yet,” I told Sandy. “Let’s wait until five-thirty or we’re going to stand around with the caterers.” We sat on the beds, momentarily quiet. I smoothed my black dress and readjusted my stilettos. Was I wearing too much makeup?
Sandy jumped up. “This is stupid,” she announced. “Let’s just go downstairs. Forget being cool! I need a drink.”
She banged on Lynn and Kimmy’s door and herded us all into an elevator. My heart began to race sickeningly as the door opened onto the kelly-green carpet of the Event Ballroom.
“You guys,” I said, panting, bending over as they formed a concerned circle around me. “I think I need to sit down.”
“You’re having an anxiety attack,” Lynn diagnosed. “I used to get them before I did riding competitions. Take a deep breath.”
I looked into their familiar faces and my heart slowed. “I’m okay,” I said finally. I desperately wanted to get away from the ominously blinking lights of the elevator bank, a direct doorway to my past that could randomly disgorge anyone.
“There’s a name-tag table,” said Kimmy, taking charge. Tags with identifying senior-year photos were neatly laid out, along with a crude box with a hole cut in the middle and a pile of three-by-five cards. CLASSMATES, GET OUT THE VOTE! a hand-lettered sign read. CAST YOUR BALLOT HERE!!!! VOTE FOR: MOST CHANGED, LEAST CHANGED, MOST LIKELY TO HAVE MIDLIFE CRISIS, LONGEST TRIP TO GET HERE, ETC.!!!!
We affixed our tags and went straight to the bar for white-wine spritzers. “No red wine all night,” ordered Sandy. “It’ll dye your teeth.” She looked down at her senior-year photo. “Do you believe I got a perm, with my curly hair? And of course when it got flat on top, I went to Jo-Ann’s Hair ’Em and permed the perm.” Her eyes widened. “Look,” she whispered. “I think that’s Brian Miller, but I’m not entirely sure.” Mildew? Was he with Christian? I looked his way with elaborate casualness, smiling vaguely.
“Let’s go talk to him,” said Sandy, dragging me over just as she did in high school. “Hey, Mildew!” she hollered.
He looked shorter than I remembered, and was wearing the same khakis and oxford shirt of his preppy youth. He was balding from the top down, but the growth at the bottom was still lush, and a little too long as it curled over his collar. His green eyes were still beautiful in his slightly puffy face.
He smiled. “What’s up?” he said mildly, as if we had just seen him last week and not two decades ago. I briefly hesitated. Did I give him a kiss? I had never kissed Mildew in my life. Did you shake hands, or hug? I made an emergency decision to kiss every classmate on the cheek, even if I had never touched him or her in my life. We were all grown-ups.
I asked Mildew a few halting questions and relaxed a little as he droned on about his adult day-care empire. Christ, was he always this dull? “These are really high-end units,” he was saying. “It’s an un
derserved market, and as baby boomers age, they’re used to the good life, so this facility is really state-of-the-art. There’s a large garden in the back where residents can grow vegetables and flowers, a hair salon, lunch prepared by a gourmet chef, a spiritual hour…”
“What’s a spiritual hour?” I asked.
“You know, meditation and what have you. We try to be nondenominational. And we have a computer room with twenty computers, all brand new, as well as executive vans for transportation, and…”
This was a person who once attended a party wearing only his socks, a guy who earned his nickname by happily living in his mother’s dank basement, where he hung a tapestry over the one grimy window to block out the feeble light. He brought in a bumper-pool table and a water bed and, for the crowning touch, enlisted Christian and Michael Garrett to help him construct a full bar next to the washing machine. Now he appeared to be easing into a sales pitch. Was he ever going to ask me a question? Was he even remotely curious about anything that I had done?
Mercifully, other classmates approached me and for the next half an hour a festival of exclamations ensued. Hiiiii! You look amazing! Good, good, I live in Rahway, you know where that is, near Linden? How many kids do you have? Three? Well, then, you have your hands full, am I right?
I looked over at the lobby and blanched. Dawn was walking hesitantly in with her husband, whom she had said she was leaving at home. There was something about her ill-fitting blue taffeta dress that twisted my heart. I flushed with shame at the insincere message I had left on her machine.
I hurried over to her. “Hi, Dawn,” I said. I hugged her but she stayed rigid. “This must be Dave.” He was a husky man with a pleasant face and deep dimples. He shook my hand. “I left you a message a while ago, trying to catch you,” I rushed on. “It’s been completely chaotic today, and I guess we just missed each other.”
She nodded. “Right. I left a couple of messages with your parents. Let’s just talk about it later, okay? I want to have fun tonight.”
