Living Out Loud Read Free Page B

expect to come around the right corner, past the right telephone booth, and see a vaguely familiar sixteen-year-old waiting for a call from some moron with a nice car and a letter in wrestling. What a horrible thought—the thirty-four-year-old me trying to convince her of the monumental waste of time, the sixteen-year-old me wondering why this lady with the two kids and the gray in her bangs is haranguing her. If I was so vulnerable and stupid then, can I really be so strong and smart now?
    I was not surprised when the deep-sea pictures of the
Titanic
showed it perfectly preserved, down to the crystal chandeliers. It has happened here. Fifty years from now, if I am lucky, I will be an old lady in a rubber beach chair, staring at the water, seeing them all, all the little papier-mâché people: the little girl with the T-shirt over her bathing suit, the teenager listening to the radio and glistening with baby oil, the mother of babies, the mother of teenagers, the grandmother. “Who cares?” the water will whisper, but by then it will have lost its awful power over me, and I will no longer hear it.

REUNION

    R obert called me “baby” just recently. “Same old Robert,” Donna said. The only difference was that the last time he said it I was thirteen years old and unsure whether I was supposed to be amused, offended, or flattered. He was my best boyfriend, with the emphasis on the
friend
. We spent hours on the phone together each night deciding which girl deserved his tie clip. I still know the telephone number at his mother’s house by heart.
    I went to the twentieth reunion of my eighth grade class the other night. It was nearly a five-hour drive, there and back. Some people I know thought I was a little crazy: high school, maybe, or college, but grade school? Perhaps they went to a different kind of school.
    A couple of dozen of us started out together when we were small children, and stayed together until we were just entering adolescence. Those were the people with whom I learned the alphabetand the Our Father, how to shoot from the foul line and do a cartwheel. Those were some of the most important years of my life. We know now how important the early years are, but the early years lasted longer then, and while the bedrock on which I am built came from my family, many of my first lessons in friendship, loss, loyalty, and love came from a group of people I have not seen for two decades. They have always seemed somehow more real to me than most of the people I have known since.
    It was odd, how much the same we all looked. It would have been hard for the women to look worse, or at least worse than our graduation picture, with all of us grouped on the lawn by the convent. Most of us look younger now than we did there, our poor hair lacquered into beehives or baloney curls, our feet squeezed into pumps with pointed toes.
    And it was odd how much the same we were, odd how early the raw material had been set. Robert was still the class flirt, Janet still elegant. “Refined” was how I described her in a sixth-grade composition—a funny word for an eleven-year-old girl, and yet the right one, particularly now that it suited her so. In the photograph, Alicia and Susie are sitting together; they drove down together, arrived together, were still friends. In the photograph, Donna and I are next to each other, trying not to crack up. “Still inseparable,” said Jeff, the class president, looking down at the two of us giggling on the steps. The truth was that although we had not met for fifteen years, the ice was broken within minutes.
    I’m not sure that I would have done well at a tenth reunion. If the raw material is laid down in those first thirteen years, the next thirteen sometimes seem to me to have been given over fruitlessly to the art of artifice, the attempt to hide the flaws beneath a construction as false as those 1966 beehives. Now I am much more who I am, with fewer regrets, apologies, and attempts to be