Living Out Loud (4 page)

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.

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 alphabet
and 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 something else. To be honest, I am much more
like 1966 than I would have been likely to admit ten years ago. Perhaps it was the beer, but some of the others seemed to be letting down their defenses, too.

Ed remembered that when he had had to think of his most embarrassing moment for a Dale Carnegie course, it was something that had happened in elementary school. (“You’re not going to put it in?” he asked plaintively, a lifetime after it happened, and so I said I would not.) And Jim, the host of the party, suddenly said as he saw Robert and me trading wisecracks, “You guys and your clique,” making me think, for the first time, really of how thoughtlessly hurtful we were then, too. I suppose in a way it was like many reunions. We talked about the time we Crazy-Foamed the gym, went on class picnics to Naylor’s Run and dared to go to the public-school canteen. There were children to discuss, and deaths and divorces. Most of the men still lived in the area. Most of the women had moved away. Most of the men came with their wives. Most of the women came alone.

And yet I felt that it was a different kind of occasion, at least for me. Steve had brought photographs from class trips and parties, and in one of them there I was in the front in a plaid dress, my bangs cut too short, my new front teeth a little too big for my face, and it was like looking at one of those photographs of an embryo. On Jim’s back porch I looked around and I saw so many prototypes: my first close friendship, my first jealousies, my first boyfriend—all the things that break you in for all the things that are yet to come. I felt like Emily in
Our Town
.

Robert and I talked a lot about Martha. It turned out that over the years he had never forgotten her. He was crushed that she had not been able to come up from Florida where she is a teacher. Besides, he said, she still has his tie clip. But it wasn’t really Martha he was talking about as much as a basic model he learned then. He liked her and she liked him. It was only
later that he, I, and all the rest of us learned that is the basic model, but it sometimes it comes with fins and a sunroof, with games and insecurities and baggage that are just barely burgeoning when you are thirteen years old.

On the stereo was a song, a 45, that we must have played thousands of times in my living room: “She Loves You” by the Beatles. “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” Robert played the drums. I sang. He made a grab for me, and I slipped past him. “Same old Robert,” I said to Donna.

T
he cats came with the house. They lived in the backyards, tiger gray, orange marmalade, calico, black. They slithered through the evergreens at the back perimeter, and during mating season their screams were terrible. Sometimes I shook black pepper along the property line, and for a night or two all was still. Then the rain came and they were back.

The cats came because of the woman next door. She and her husband, said to be bedridden, had lived on the third floor for many years. Every evening after dinner she went into the alley with a foil pie plate heaped with cat food and scraps: cabbage, rice, the noodles from chicken noodle soup, whatever they had had for dinner. Before she would even get to the bottom of the stairs the cats would begin to assemble, narrowing their eyes. She would talk to them roughly in a voice like sandpaper, coarse from years of cigarette
smoke. “Damn cats,” she grumbled as she bent to put the food down.

She had only two interests besides the cats: my son and her own. She and her husband had one grown child. I never heard her say a bad word about him. He had reportedly walked and talked early, been as beautiful as a child star, never given a bit of trouble. He always sent a large card on Mother’s Day, and each Christmas a poinsettia came, wrapped in green foil with a red bow. He was in the military, stationed here and there. During the time we lived next door to her, he came home once. She said it broke his heart not to see his father more. She said they had always been close when he lived at home, that he played baseball for the high school team and that his father never missed a game. He was a crack shortstop, she said, and a superior hitter.

She called my son “Bop Bop” because of the way he bounced in my arms. It was one of the first things he learned to say, and when he was in the backyard on summer evenings he would call “Bop Bop” plaintively until she came to her apartment window. As she raised the screen the cats would begin to mass in a great Pavlovian gesture at the head of the alley. “Are you being a good boy?” she would call down. Bop Bop would smile up, his eyes shining. “Cat,” he said, pointing, and the cats looked, too. Some summer nights she and my little boy would sit together companionably on the front stoop, watching the cars go by. She did not talk to him very much, and she wasn’t tender, but when he was very good and not terribly dirty she sometimes said he looked just like her own little boy, only his hair wasn’t quite as thick.

Last year she fell on the street and broke her hip, but while she was in the hospital, they found that she had fallen because she had had a stroke, and she had had a stroke because of brain cancer. I went to see her in the hospital, and brought a picture of my son. She propped it against the water pitcher. She asked
me to take care of her parakeet until she came home, to look in on her husband and to feed the cats. At night, when I came back from work, they would be prowling the yards, crying pitifully. My dogs lunged at the back windows.

When the ambulance brought her home, she looked like a scarecrow, her arms broomsticks in the armholes of her housecoat, her white hair wild. A home health-care aide came and cared for her and her husband. The woman across the street told me she was not well enough to take the bird back. The cats climbed the fire escape and banged against the screens with their bullet heads, but the aide shooed them away. My son would stand in the backyard and call “Bop Bop” at the window. One evening she threw it open and leaned out, a death’s head, and shouted at him, and he cried. “Bop Bop is very sick,” I said, and gave him a Popsicle.

She died this winter, a month after her husband. Her son came home for the funerals with his wife, and together they cleaned out the apartment. We sent roses to the funeral home, and the son’s wife sent a nice thank-you note. The bird died the next month. Slowly the cats began to disperse. The two biggest, a torn and a female, seem to have stayed. I don’t really feed them, but sometimes my son will eat lunch out back; if he doesn’t finish his food, I will leave it on the table. When I look out again it is gone, and the dogs are a little wild.

My son likes to look through photo albums. In one there is a picture of her leaning out the window, and a picture of him looking up with a self-conscious smile. He calls them both “Bop Bop.” I wonder for how long he will remember, and what it will mean to him, years from now, when he looks at the picture and sees her at her window, what reverberations will begin, what lasting lessons will she have subliminally taught him, what lasting lessons will she not so subliminally have taught me.