Oh God, Scottie! Feel." Scared kids' eyes inside rubbery adult masks. Stragglers kept arriving, many of them alone. "If you have to read the name tag, it's probably no one important."
"God damn, the names seem always to fall just at the seam of my bifocals." Some names, Brenda Rhinebeck, Pokie Renke, Sonny Deidenbach, were unrecognizable even after we did a quick check of yearbook.
Artie Lutz, our beloved Class Clown, lived up to his reputation usual.
Wearing his old football jersey which gave him a "sort of watermelonpregnant chic" he threw a bevy of onlookers into alarm by over the redwood deck's railing--leaning far over--so that Mary Louise Schultz and the mysterious unknown (but not bad-looking) Brenda Rhinebeck seized him by the belt to haul him back--"Artie Lutz! Are you crazy!" Artie gravely that he couldn't see the bottom of the ravine, it was too dark--"Or too far down." Millie Leroux's husband, MacK Pifer, our host, kept disappearing the California-style Normandy chateau as if our din was too much for his ears, then he'd reappear, wiping his beaming face, to reassure that, yes certainly the redwood deck was perfectly safe, the architect who'd it was a famous Buffalo architect and the contractor who'd built it was the best in the business--"But, still, if you didn't all congregate one end? Sort of spread your self around? There are tables on the lawn, too.
inside the house. And if you didn't stomp your feet, friends, at least not unison?" We laughed, we applauded Millie's rich, smart, sweetly funny-looking husband ("Kind of like a penguin, but shrewd"). There was coweyed Millie laughing, too. (We were thinking of how, in tenth grade, when we were lined up on the edge of the pool, buck naked, at the of swim class, poor Millie had come wandering in looking for her wristwatch. ) A few of us, bold, whistling, the usual bad-boys and goof-offs, chafing inside our middle-aged-body costumes, may even have "stomped" our feet in umson.
But the redwood deck, though quivering, as with its own vengeful life, at that time of evening, 9,48 P. M. (Ritchie Eickhorn nervously watch), still held.
The HARTSSOFT cyberspace explorers regaled us flat-footed with the wonders of what they called
"VR"--"VIRTUAL REALITY"-"A wholly computer-generated reality"--"Reality without randomness.
with a purpose, a principle, an intelligence, an evolutionary blueprint in which mere contingency' and catastrophe' have no role." (Was this Merchant, speaking with such authority? We were relieved to see had cleared up. ) Ginger McCord who'd hardly been an intellectual called out with flirty belligerence, "What then of tragedy'? Will you eliminate tragedy'?" Petey Merchant frowned, and replied, "If we
'tragic persons' we will eliminate tragedy." Clarence McQuade chortled, "We may have to eliminate persons. The revolution is at hand!"
no idea what these guys were talking about but we liked it they'd made good in the world beyond Willowsville, we applauded, whistled and stamped our feet. Jax Whitehead cried," VR' for Prez!" A blissed-out mood just as Reggie Edgihoffer arrived with, literally, an armful of crimson and orange gladioli for his hostess whom he hugged, and who hugged him--"Oh, Reggie!
We'd been wondering where you were." And a flurry of a false alarm, excitement that Veronica Myers was arriving just behind Reggie, by he'd said, unless in the din we'd misheard) direct from the airport, a white stretch limo with dark-tinted windows--"Verrie? Verrie's here?
"--we about looking for Verrie, we had our cameras poised to flash--where?
It was a time of squeals, screams, rib-cracking hugs and wet kisses. Tongues probing tongues like eyeless sea creatures frantic to touch, to couple, to mate. "There was Katie Olmsted we'd heard was crippled, an iron lung. She's on her feet lunging at us!"
"There was Ketch Campbell we'd heard was dead. And his wife what's-her-name, looking pregnant.
"There were the Zwaarts we'd heard were deep into therapy to save their marriage-poor Jenny, she's a zombie on Xanax." There was Molly Enzeimer in her maroon cheerleader's jumper and starched white blouse, leading group of us in cheers-Wolverines! Wolverines!
You're the team of our dreams YAY'Y!
"Molly's still cute, for a woman of almost fifty, but, in that uniform, with those hips, she looks like a hot little sausage. ") There was a Amazonlooking female, bronzed skin, granite-gray hair, not of generation--"Miss Flechsenhauer? Wow." There was elderly Mr.. Larsen with flesh-colored plastic hearing aids in his ears, dazedly shaking hands with a totally bald, stoop-shouldered but pugnacious old gent in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts--"Mr.. Hornby? Wow." There was Mr.. Cuthbert in his sixties, teaching at WHS, smiling, trying not to spill champagne on his blazer, offering us witty remarks on the occasion of our thirtieth reunion and pretending to remember us, with that embalmed look of the veteran across whose increasingly impervious gaze so many generations of adolescents have passed that he'd acquired a vaguely beneficent patina, like a weatherworn statue. There was Miss Bird, now retired, in her sixties? early seventies? still with her brave carroty-red perm, in "stylish" clothes of a bygone era cupping her hands to her mouth to inquire, as she does at every reunion, "Do any of you ever hear from him? John Reddy? That poor, doomed boy?" (We know better than to speak to Miss Bird of Mr..
Dunleddy.
Her watery eyes blink rapidly, her thin lipsticked mouth trembles, she'll pretend not to hear and ask again, "Do any of you hear from him.7--John Reddy? ") In fact there came, stumbling onto the redwood deck, an liver-spotted gentleman with tremors in both hands, some of us believed was Mr.. Dunleddy--"Look, it can't be. Mr.. Dunleddy is dead." Well, this Mr..
Stamish? --Mr.. Sternberg? There came a stiffly smiling oldish man striped sport coat and ascot, wearing a starkly black-dyed toupee--"I almost burst into tears seeing him, I'd had such a crush on Mr.. Lepage! But Mr..
Lepage, hard of hearing amid the party noise, wasn't his "old self"--you could tell--so it was a relief when he asked Millie to lead him away. None of j our teachers (except Miss Flechsenhauer who was laughing with a half-dozen girls from the field hockey team) endured the party for X more than a few minutes--"I love our old teachers but thank God they leave ' early, we can relax and be ourselves." There was busty Sandi Scott breathing X into the ear of mysterious Jocko ("vista Investments, Piscataway, New Jersey") asking with wistful coquettishness if he remembered her from school.7--"Just any stray memory, any glimpse, anything," and Jocko peered smiling at the name tag on Sandi's heaving left breast and murmured, "Sandi. Of course. You were, to me, the most beautiful, fascinating girl in our class. I stared at you opening your locker--I had a wild fantasy, your fingers turning the combination of your lock were turning me. Always I'd wanted to date you but--I was too damned shy." A Mystery Man in a summer suit came pushing up to the bar, shook hands all around, hairless face and gleaming globe of a head, eyes pouched in wrinkles like an ancient tortoise's, he'd lost weight, obviously, once a heavy and now weighing not more than one hundred twenty pounds, his fingernails and rippled and his breath metallic as damp copper. Despite the midsummer air and the heat of our bodies we shivered and tasted cold. He seemed to know all our names--"Trish! "--"Art! "--"Shelby! "--"Pattianne! "-"Roger!" Our sports, activities, class offices. Where we'd lived in Willowsville, and which of our families were "vanished" from the area. This was our age presumably but looked decades older. His features had out like paper left too long in the sun. He had no eyebrows or lashes. No hairs in his ears or in his enormous black nostrils.
"Chemotherapy," Carolyn Cameron murmured. ) Dwayne Hewson, in his capacity as one of the reunion hosts, came over and shook the Mystery Man's hand briskly--"Who'd you say you were, I didn't quite hear." The Mystery Man smiled gloatingly.
"Did I say? I didn't quite hear." Others gathered near. We made game of trying to identify him--"Well. You're not Rindfleisch, he's right over there.
You're not Zwaart--he's over there. You're not Norm Zeiga--you don't speak with a weird accent. You're not Larry Baumgart, he's a big fella. You're not Pete Marsh--he's gone from us. You're not Bo Bozer--ditto.
Nordstrom? --nope. Or--" Janet Moss scre
amed, "Larry Baumgart!
for the senior prom." We stared, astonished. Who?
She was standing hesitantly at the edge of the party. A dark-haired owl-eyed individual with a narrow, pinched nose, the nostrils rapidly expanding and contracting as she inhaled the aroma of roasting pig. So dressed, in a white shirt of some shiny synthe ic fabric, black satin bow tie, black tuxedolike jacket and black rayon trousers with two-inch cuffs that flowed, visibly dusty, over her clunky orthopedic-looking black patent-leather shoes--you couldn't blame Millie for discreetly scolding her, even as Millie maintained an icy, composed smile, asking why wasn't she helping the glasses, etc. , with the other caterers' assistants? why wasn't she helping with the suckling pig? or preparing the corn? why was she simply there doing nothing? and Trish Elders, embarrassed, discreetly nudged her friend Millie to indicate that, just possibly, this odd-looking woman wasn't one of the hired help, but--"My God. Is it--Elise Petho?" It was.
Even before arriving at the reunion some of us had begun nervously fingering our faces. And, at the reunion, it got worse. A new pimple?
Pimples?
We were alert to that deep-rooted throbbing that, overnight, into reddened pustulated boils. Some of us anxiously checked to if our braces were back on our teeth. It couldn't be possible, and yet--!
We'd been taught that humankind is essentially spirit, were we mistaken?
In memoriam. Bo Bozer's third wife, we weren't certain of her name, his widow in fact whom none of us knew, a glamour-girl type with skin, couldn't have been more than twenty-five or -six, showed up staring and blinking moistly at us. "We'd been doing Bo imitations a few minutes earlier! No one knew Mrs.. Bozer was coming." Poor Bo, hadn't seen him since our twentieth reunion, he was a vice president for some swimming pool manufacturer in New Jersey and he'd died one of ambiguous deaths. He was in the habit of calling his old teammate Hewson from time to time, usually drunk, maudlin and despairing
"just like Bozer, hilarious--except for the coughing," and he'd complained to Dwayne last time they spoke that the powerful pills he had to take for his blood pressure were making him impotent so he'd risked a stroke them and "poor bastard, you know Bo he cracks me up--'I'm even impotent without em. Go figure." Bo had died in a Days Inn room only a few miles from his East Orange, New Jersey, home and none of us felt right asking his wife or relatives (there were some Bozers still living in the area) about the circumstances, nor did any of us, even Dwayne and Art Lutz, manage to get down for Bo's funeral a few months ago.
So Bo's third wife, a girl with big, crimped hair like a country-and-western singer, a stranger to us all, showed up with no warning carrying what she called
"Bo's urn"--"Bo's ashes"--"Actually not all of them, only a few ounces"--asking Millie Leroux if she could place the urn in some unobtrusive spot at the party, for instance a windowsill overlooking the deck. The urn didn't seem like an urn, it was a square box of black plastic textured to look stoneware, about five inches cubed. Mrs.. Bozer was wiping at her eyes--"Bo X just loved you all so. He didn't love many people, that wasn't his heart, f but he'd look through your yearbook, he'd talk about basketball games he'd X been in, and football--'Dwayne, Doug, Ken, Smoke, John Reddy'-high school was the happiest time of Bo's life he'd say, It wasn't a happy time but it was my happiest time. I always felt I got to know Bo too late.
You're the ones who really knew him. He sort of understood he'd be going to die soon, hints he'd made, things he'd told me, how possibly he wasn't going to make his thirtieth reunion with you guys but he hoped you wouldn't forget him so I thought I'd do this for him, O. K. ? I mean, I hope it isn't morbid or anything? --" There was so much noise at the party, our old classic rock tapes turned up high, so Millie had to ask Bo's weepy widow to repeat some of this, then with her usual composure Millie said, as the rest us stared appalled, "Why, no. But make sure you take it away again when you leave." He was trying to avoid her. His date for the senior prom. Her myopic eyes snatching eagerly at his. "As if we'd been lovers. As if the intervening years hadn't mattered." It seemed to him, he must be imagining it, still had braces! He recalled their awkward dancing at the prom, by those glamorous-sexy others. The virulent-sweet gardenia that from her meager left breast encased in chill royal-blue taffeta.
Her breath that smelled, to his sensitive nostrils, yeasty. (He'd imagined with horror scummy back teeth teeming with bacteria. Her forced smile, bacteria. He was a biology major, and knew all about bacteria. ) He'd been tricked into asking her, brainy Elise Petko, homely Elise Petko, his rival Elise Petko, to the senior prom. "Elise's mother has died, Dexter. It would be so sweet of you! I'll save a dance for you, and so will Trish, Louise, Verrie--we promise." But they'd forgotten. He hadn't seen them evening.
Now Elise Petko, nearly fifty years old, a waxy ravaged girl's face, a disappointed face, her surprisingly hard, thin fingers gripping his wrist--"Thank God you're here, Dexter! Isn't this hideous? These people?
values?
They haven't changed at all. They're still adolescents--look at them flirting and fawning! Look at those two--they're practically necking.
can't keep their hands off each other--it's disgusting. Tell me about your new position--director of the National Science Foundation. I'm proud you, Dexter. Did you get my note? I'm happy for you. I'm not happy, I'm happy for you. I won't ask about your wife, your family. You needn't ask about my personal life. I don't have a personal life. I'd women had no more need of personal lives. I lived for my work. I still do.
isn't fair, it should never have happened, life is a gigantic lottery, I'm the one, valedictorian of my graduatlng class! SAT scores in the highest percentile!
to Barnard, graduate fellowship to Columbia! tenure track at Michigan! and then--I'm one who slipped through the cracks. I'm not bitter, please don't misunderstand. Don't look at me like that, you don't understand.
Maybe we could slip out of here, this ridiculous suckling-pig roast, and talk quietly?
I'm staying at the Matador Inn. At the airport. What about you?
didn't want to stay with relatives. My parents are dead. I'm not close my relatives. Why was I denied tenure? --because people in my field were jealous of me, frightened of me, my original research, my independence. My reputation for being an iconoclast--" Elise laughed shrilly, her teeth shone.
Dexter believed he saw braces but surely he was mistaken. "Excuse me," he murmured, disengaging the woman's fingers from his wrist, "--I to use the b-bathroom " She was a young woman covering our Thirtieth Weekend Reunion for the Butfalo Evening News Style section. So young, we were stunned to learn, she'd never heard of John Reddy Heart, let alone Dahlia Heart or Melvin Riggs, Jr. ("Wasn't Riggs some old-time baseball player?
Like, I don't know--Babe Ruth? ") She took photos of us, singly, in small and in large, she seemed fascinated by us, in that way a certain kind of sharp-eyed anthropologist-type young person can be fascinated by her elders, or can give that impression, she asked us what was the origin of our famous tradition of roast pig? --and we were stumped how to reply.
"It's what we do.
We started with roast suckling pig, and we continue."
"It's a quirky tradition, but it's ours."
"Even those of us who never eat meat, and dislike pork, including hardcore vegetarians like Kate Olmsted, Mary Louise Schultz, health-food fanatics, have said they'd be terribly upset' if the tradition was broken."
"Why? Who knows why? If you have to ask, you're the tradition."
"None of us, we discovered by a newsletter poll, ever eats roast pig except at these reunion feasts. Many never eat ham or pork at all."
"We're the only WHS class that roasts a pig, and we're the only class, we've been told, that has such strong emotional ties with one another."
"Our reunions are, on an average, the best-attended of any in the history of the school. That's a fact."
"That is a fact, and we're proud of it.
can be verified at the school office."
"Ev
ery year the pig gets larger. We began With a seventy-five-pound pig--a long time ago. Tonight's, Millie tells us, is a onehundred-six pounder. That's a lot of pig!"
"And we're a lot of appetite. That's our tradition." And so we fell under the spell of the Pig. For every year as the Pig increased in bulk, the time required for its roasting increased, and we ate later and were more famished. And drunker. Roast pig turned slowly on spit over smoldering embers. Naked hairless body. You stare appalled, fascinated. Why is any naked body, so trussed, so gutted, vacant-eyed, a female body?
You breathe t -in the rich succulent aroma, mouthwatering to the poillt of pain. Pertect pig, perfect victim, mute, eyeless and unresisting. "This is my body and this is my blood." Slowly turning on the cruel spit. Tenderly tended by servants in altar-boy white uniforms. Even those of us who'd stutfed ourselves earlier in the evening are panting with desire by the time the Pig is served.
Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Page 45
