Go to the reunion? Of course I’m not going to the reunion! I’m the one who left after ninth grade, remember? Got kicked out of one school and bounced out of the next. At the fourth high school I attended, I walked into the office and said, “I really need to graduate. I can do two years in one.” They agreed to let me try and I did it—stoned. I’m the only one in our class who never went to college. Why would I go to the reunion?
Just come to the dinner. We’re all going. It’s our 35th.
Our 35th? How is that possible when we’re still in our 30s? Try 50s, try menopause, try divorce, try grown children living at home in their 20s.
Try saying no to some of your oldest friends.
***
As the reunion approached I felt nothing but dread. I’d been a scholarship kid at this highly competitive all-girls school in Manhattan. My parents were writers, not bankers. I navigated the economic disparities by pretending they didn’t matter. An addiction to reading pulled me through the academics. Plus, my friends were the best. Some of my closest friends are still the ones I met between kindergarten and ninth grade. This was where I found the friendships, faculty, and books that formed me. That school made me a writer despite my crash and burn adolescence.
Things weren’t going particularly well on the eve of our 35th reunion. I was too old to be patching together adjunct teaching jobs while single-parenting two daughters. In the 19th century novels our English teachers loved to assign, I was a character who hadn’t “married well.” Or perhaps more accurately, I hadn’t “divorced well.” When everything fell apart one of my friends said, “Well, you married a juggler.” She wasn’t speaking metaphorically. Instead of college, I ran away to circus school in Paris and became a trapeze artist. By my 35th high school reunion, I was a divorced writer like my parents, and my daughters were on scholarship at the same school I had left after ninth grade.
You can take refuge in irony longer than you might think.
***
Most nights I allowed myself one cigarette on the fire escape after I put the girls to bed. I would have liked a vodka with a twist, but I was taking anti-anxiety meds and couldn’t risk any side effects when I was holding up the whole world. Which was in itself a side effect of abrupt endings I hadn’t seen coming. Nothing was turning out the way I thought it would. Including the reunion.
Our dinner was hosted by a classmate at her parents’ apartment. This was the kind of Manhattan apartment that disappeared with that generation. The buffet was chilled fruit and soft cheese. The stainless-steel dinnerware was exactly the right weight. There were about twenty of us at the dinner. I had skipped all the events at the school. Tonight, I would do a quick hello and an Irish goodbye. I stood awkwardly near the friends I was still close to. Maybe the fun part would be gossiping about the reunion after it was over. Who’d had “work” done? Who seemed exactly the same as they were in sixth grade? Was anyone comfortable in their own skin?
Our 35th? How is that possible when we’re still in our 30s? Try 50s, try menopause, try divorce, try grown children living at home in their 20s. Try saying no to some of your oldest friends.
“I’m afraid I won’t get to speak with all of you,” said a cheerful voice, as people settled with their plates in the living room. “Why don’t we go around and say a bit about what’s going on in our lives?” I put down my wine glass. I would slip quietly out the door and rush back home to my girls. They wouldn’t ask me to sum up the past decade. I could run a bubble bath and read my book. The best part of the day. A hand grabbed my elbow. “Don’t go.” It was one of my oldest and bestest.
“Come with me,” I whispered. We hadn’t seen each other in a while and I missed her.
She patted the spot next to her on the couch. “Just for a little while.”
Waiting for my turn to talk about myself was like waiting to be picked in gym class, if gym was filled with middle-aged women wearing Eileen Fisher and Ferragamo flats. We had frozen shoulders, knee replacements, and hormone replacement therapy. Someone started us off with what I like to shorthand as: “The twins are at Brown.” But pretty soon there was blood all over the floor. Lost partners, troubled children, derailed careers, aging parents, illness, addiction, divorce. There were some ragged holes left by early deaths. There were some glorious U-turns. We had built businesses, run clinics, chaired board rooms, moved to another country. One of us was a minister. One was already a grandparent. We laughed about becoming the adults in the room. How had any of this happened?
I still had no idea what to say about my tilted life as everyone took their turn, moving closer and closer to my spot, one by one. How to explain that I spent my free time on the fire escape waiting for Rumpelstiltskin to weave my straw into gold?
When there were only two people before me, I excused myself and ducked into the bedroom where the coats were piled, resisting the urge to burrow underneath them. I picked up my bag from the floor, took out a small notebook and walked back into the living room. Some of the women had slipped off their shoes. A few were wiping their eyes. It was my turn.
“Instead of talking about my life,” I said. “I’m going to read a poem.” For the past few weeks, I’d been trying to memorize a poem as I rode the subway. It was a long poem that would take forever to memorize—which was the point. It distracted me from reading the ads for becoming a dental hygienist or legal assistant. I was so overeducated and underemployed. “I think you’ll know this one,” I said, opening my notebook. “We had to read it in school.” I skipped the title. They would all know it after the first line.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,The night above the dingle starry
“Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. I could feel the tide rising in the room. None of us had grown up in a dingle starry, but we were bound together by the books we had read as children. I made it almost all the way through without crying.
Time held me green and dying,
though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Nothing was the same but we were still here, green and dying, like the poet said. Just like the old days and nothing like the old days.
I was one of the last to leave.
 | A guest post by
|
Of course go to the reunion! You were the coolest kid in school (even though younger than me). They need your quirkiness more than oxygen.
This is a beautiful piece of writing.