I am wearing a girdle. We are in the truck and I can barely move, each bump of the struts forcing my internal organs to spoon. It’s ridiculous, really, that I would wedge myself into this modern version of that old sadistic contraption, my hip and belly fat now resting uncomfortably near my neck. It’s ridiculous because I see so many of these people, these gentle people, pretty regularly on a day-to-day basis. It’s not like I traveled far beyond my bittersweet sticky hometown in the first place. It’s not like they don’t know what I look like now, how much older, thicker, quieter I’ve gotten. It’s not like Facebook hasn’t made our lives a high school Groundhog’s Day as it is. Still, it’s my 15th reunion and so, this girdle. This awful girdle. Me, and it, at my high school reunion. Thick as thieves.
I walk in cold with sweat. I introduce my husband over and over, even though he’s met them all a hundred times. He was there, after all, in the beginning, whether they remember this or not. He was that faithful payphone ring in the commons, that daily lunch call, that lifeline thrown to this drowning girl whose waters were always choppier than anyone else’s, or so it always seemed to her, me. Some days I close my eyes and I can still smell the sharks.
These people, however, were not the sharks. These people, my former classmates, still make me smile, this small town menagerie of Midwestern kindness. There are a few I wish I’d spent more time with. There are a few I wonder if I really knew at all. There are several I want to snatch and drag out back right now, ask them everything I never realized I wanted, needed, to know. Finally take that smoke.
For a tiny moment between laughs and shifting feet I remember how much I cared. I remember how often I wept, how tightly I clenched, how much I thought I lost. I don’t remember the details, the hard facts, as much as I remember the grief, the angst, the flashes of self-hatred and hurt, the bewilderment. The regret.
The truth is I barely survived high school. I don’t know how many of my classmates realize that, I honestly don’t. I don’t know if their memories are better than mine, if they look at me and see only that hot mess of a kid, that girl who sort of lost it halfway through… or if time has softened their perceptions. They are certainly friendly now, more than fair in their faith, more than I think I deserve. I am grateful.
My freshman year was an awful shock, my sophomore year a blur of rebellion, my junior year a singularly focused mission of escape. My senior year never happened, I’d already gone off to college. (Mission accomplished.) One boy defined that second year for me, in the most awful, awful way. A different boy bolstered that third year. Thank God for that boy in my third year, that boy who stands beside me now, at my reunion. Every five minutes or so I steal a glance and he’s always looking my way. All these years later.
I can’t figure out if I’m a fool or not. I look at each of these faces and there’s not a single one I dislike, not a one I thought ill of then or now—but did they feel the same? Or did they whisper themselves hoarse behind my back? It’s a thought that used to disturb me far more often than it does these days, these days where I just don’t care the way I once did. In fact, the only thing that truly shakes me now is this quiet sense of loss, this active noticing of the places people should be standing, people who no longer are, much the way my watercolor artist mom paints the negative spaces into a glorious whole. The rest is easy, light, all pastel cream tubes of color and liquid and sun. The beer is smooth and cheap, the meats miniature and saucy, the laughs thick and abundant. I rock my best friend’s baby. I inhale his newness. I grin at my lot, my blessed, blessed lot.
Later, much later, our truck in my parents’ driveway, the flex of Dave’s jeans as he climbs the stairs, a sudden smack of dizzy, of disorientation. He disappears inside the house and I stare at that front porch, framed by his windshield, an old movie flickering, and I see him there, I see us, there, the first time his hand dared creep inside my shirt, right there on that swing, I watch it play out. I don’t want to look away. He steps out now, interrupts the film, a sweet solid dad behind his old feverish ghost, our daughters draped across his shoulders. Our girls. When did this happen?
Our oldest is now a fourth grader. She blinks, all heavy sleep and confusion in the backseat. I remember my classmates as fourth graders, me and Joel colliding into concussion at recess, Eliza dumping her retainer in the hot lunch bin, Dusty and his box cars, Miss Suzy and her Steamboat and her glorious curses on the bus. Most of all I remember that I was me, that we were us, and I look at my daughter and I wonder what’s to come. I wonder what will plague her, what she’ll be thankful for, whose salty forearm she’ll study in the midnight glow as it steers her family home, everything she ever cared about, everything that ever really meant something, safe, as long as he’s at the wheel.
