The Last Time I Saw You (17 page)

When they were in their forties, Dorothy and Judy and Linda had made a vow never to talk about health problems the way their mothers did. “Well, I just don’t know
what
to do about my
gall
bladder,” Judy had said that day, joking around. And now look. Just a week ago, she said that very same thing to Dorothy, and it wasn’t funny at all. Dorothy thought,
Are you sure it’s your gallbladder? Are you sure it’s not your pancreas?
And then she started thinking about how she could not go on without Judy and Linda in her life, but at some point in the not-so-distant future, she’d have to. Or they’d have to go on without her. Unless they all died in a car wreck together, that actually might not be so bad. Bam!
Done
.

“Okay,” Pam says. “Here comes the next question. Does anyone have any dirt on any of the teachers?”

“I screwed Miss Woodman in the art supply closet,” Sam Noerper says, and a few people, including Dorothy, gasp.

Tommy Metito says, “I got her, too. Same place. A tube of oil paint came undone beneath her and she got cerulean blue all over her ass.”

“Are you
kidding
?” Pam says.

Marjorie Dunn says, “I had sex with her, too.”

“You so did not!” Linda says, and Marjorie laughs and says, “You’re right. I didn’t. But I did have sex with Mr. Garvis, that real young math teacher who came for the latter half of our senior year, but it was after graduation.”

“But this is awful!” Dorothy says. “I had no idea!”

“Oh, come on,” Buddy says. “Teachers used to flirt all the time. Remember how Mademoiselle Florin used to sit on the top of her desk and cross her legs and her skirt used to ride up real high?”

“Noooo,”
Dorothy says.

“Well, she did it in our class,” Buddy says. “Remember, guys?”

A few members of the Lettermen’s Club look at each other and nod, grinning.

“Okay,
moving on
,” Pam says. “Here’s the next question. Did your life turn out to be anything like you thought it would be?”

Silence.

“Anybody?” Pam asks.

Jenny Freeman, who was always so quiet, always the great observer, speaks up now. “Not mine. All I ever wanted was to get married and have children. I thought it was a noble goal. But then the women’s movement came along, and I felt compelled to work outside the house. It sounded great, you know, live up to your potential, everybody pitch in, it’s going to be Equal City. Which, actually, it was not, and
is
not, but at the time I bought into it. When my second was two months old, I put her in day care and I got my real estate license and I got a job. I walked around in this horrible mustard-colored blazer, selling houses. Paid a fortune to get my face put on a bus stop bench. I sold a million houses, I swear, I made a lot of money. And I so regret doing it, because I don’t feel like I ever got to know my daughter, not like I did my son. I had a red phone, it was a separate business line, and every time it rang, I’d stop whatever I was doing and talk to some client. I was afraid not to answer that goddamn phone, I might miss out! And the irony is, I did miss out. I’ve never been able to achieve the kind of relationship with my daughter that I have with my son.”

“Oh well,” Pam says. “That’s girls, isn’t it? Boys are just easier.”

“No,” Jenny says. “It’s that I wasn’t available to her. I can remember her trying to talk to me when she was growing up and I was always putting her off. The truth is, I was an awful mother.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Judy says. “You set a good example for your daughter by having a successful career!”

“No, I didn’t,” Jenny says. “I was a fucking anxious wreck. I was always tired, always feeling so much pressure. I quit cooking, which I really used to enjoy, especially baking, I used to love to bake. But after I started working, I used to have a
fit
if I got a notice to make something for a bake sale. Have you seen what bake sales have become, by the way? Nobody makes anything. It’s all supermarket crap! Remember when everything used to be homemade? Remember the pies and the banana breads and the cookies, all tied up in ribbons? Remember the
cakewalks
?”

“Yeah,” Judy says. “And remember when women used to medicate themselves in order to get through a day because they were so damn bored? You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“My daughter has been institutionalized three times for drugs. She’s had four abortions. I can’t… We don’t really talk. She lives with a man I can’t stand; I don’t think he treats her right. I go to visit her and I want to be nonjudgmental and loving and try to repair our relationship but her apartment just reeks of cigarettes and dirty dishes and garbage overflowing from this big can they keep in the kitchen, and the cats are eating from it and…” She starts to cry and then laugh, saying, “Oh, I can’t believe I said all this. I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be,” Karen Komall says, little Karen, who never measured more than four feet eleven and was regarded as a kind of pet for the student body. Everybody liked Karen, she was such a sweet girl. She ended up marrying her high school sweetheart, Tim Swift, who is one of the guys on the dead table. Vietnam. “I had a lot of problems with my son,” she said. “A lot. It’s hard to raise a son without a father. But he’s okay now. It took a long time, but he’s really got his life on track, now. If there’s anything I’ve learned about life, it’s that things always change. Which, for me, means that there’s always hope. I’ll give you my email—I’ll be glad to talk to you about this anytime.”

Jenny nods. “Thank you. I’m so… Thank you. Okay. Let’s change the subject!”

Annie—Anne—Denato says, “Well, I have a question. What did everyone hope to find, coming here tonight? And I’ll answer first. I wanted a chance to show how much I’ve changed. I wanted you all to know how much you misjudged me.”

“We did misjudge you,” Nance says. “I for one am sorry. I knew you were smart, but you were…”

“I know,” Anne says. “I had
reasons
for being that way. If you guys had had
any idea
of what went on in my house… My father did a number on me, okay? But I’m past it. I’m past all that stuff, I’m really happy now, I’m successful, and I wanted you all to
know
it. And yet, being here makes me feel like that girl in high school all over again.

“You know, when I told one of my colleagues I was coming to my fortieth high school reunion, he said,
‘Don’t go.’
We’re good friends; he knows what life was like for me in high school. But anyway, he said so many people who go to reunions think that doing so can somehow change what happened to them. That the person you’ve become might erase the person you were then. But of course that doesn’t happen. In some respects, this reunion has shown me that it’s not that you can’t go home again; it’s that you can never leave.” She swallows what’s left of her drink and then offers a big smile. “Well, but here we all are, talking to each other in a way that’s not bullshit. I say that counts for a lot. What about the rest of you? What did you want to find here?”

“Dorothy came for only one reason,” Judy says, and Dorothy’s eyes grow round and she says,
“Judy!”

“I didn’t say who,” Judy says, but then Pam says, “Well, who is it?” and Judy says, “Pete Decker,” and there it is, right out in the open for everyone to know.

“He’s married, isn’t he?” Ron asks, and Tom Gunderson says, “Getting divorced.”

“Fair game then,” Ron says, and winks at Dorothy.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Dorothy says, and Judy says, “Oh, Dorothy, sit down!”

“I have to pee!”

Pam picks up her purse. “Maybe we should all go, so none of us misses anything.”

“If we all go, the momentum will be lost,” Linda says.

“She’s right,” Judy says. And then, “Sit down, Dorothy.”

“I’m not sitting down,” Dorothy says, and Linda says, “Sit
down
!” so she does. Then she says, “Okay, I have a question. Who do you think is going to hook up tonight, besides Lester Hessenpfeffer and Candy Sullivan?”

“Lester and
Candy
?” Anne asks.

Dorothy nods gravely. “Somebody saw them on the elevator going up. They’ve been gone for a long time.”

Susie Black says, “I don’t think I’m going to hook up with anyone, but I did get kissed in the hallway. And you know who it was? It was Bill Anderson.”

Bill Anderson!
Dorothy thinks. He stayed for such a little while, she doesn’t think he even finished his dinner. He was a wreck, nothing like his former self, Dorothy couldn’t imagine what had happened to make him that way and wasn’t inclined to ask. He was sort of scary, sitting alone at a table by the bar, staring off into space. Dorothy avoided him because he looked so sad and odd. It seemed like most people did. Susie had gained quite a bit of weight, but she still had a little left of what used to make her so cute. Still with the big blue eyes, the high cheekbones.

“It was the most extraordinary thing,” she says. “The sweetest thing. We walked past each other in the hall—I was coming back from the bathroom and he was leaving, and we nodded at each other. Then he called my name, and I turned around, and he asked if I had a minute. Sure, I said. So he came up and stood real close and looked me right in the eyes for a long time. Then he told me he’d had a crush on me in high school, that he had loved me for years and he’d kept my picture in his helmet when he went to Vietnam. He said he’d wanted to ask me to the prom senior year, but he was too scared. And you know, I sat alone on prom night. Well, not alone, I sat watching television with my parents, which was worse than sitting alone. I said, ‘Oh, Bill, I would have gone with you,’ and he said, ‘You would?’ and I said ‘Yeah, I thought you were really cute!’ and he said, ‘You did?’ and I said ‘
Yeah
, in fact I had a crush on
you
.’ Which I did, I liked how shy and mysterious Bill was, I liked that. And he was really cute, that black hair, those green eyes. Real tall, and he had a little dimple in his left cheek. He said, ‘You had a crush on me?’ and I said yeah, and he said, ‘Huh. I wish you’d told me.’ And I said, ‘Me, too.’ And then he put his finger under my chin just like in the movies and gave me the most gentle kiss. And I thought about how we were both pretty good-looking in high school and now we’re both kind of wrecked, and here we were, sharing a smooch in the hallway under bad fluorescent lighting, and I thought we were more beautiful than we had ever been. You know?”

“Why don’t you call him?” Betty says.

“I thought of that. I asked for his number and he said he’d rather not give it to me. He said he had a lot of problems; he wasn’t really able to be with a woman. Wasn’t able to be with anyone, really.”

She shrugs, and Dorothy can see that she’s close to tears. “It’s too late. It really is. He was such a sweet guy, too. I knew him, and he was just so
sweet
.” She shakes her head. “Man oh man. There’s just a million ways a life can go. Isn’t there?”

EIGHTEEN

L
ESTER AND
C
ANDY ARE LYING ON THEIR BACKS ON HER
hotel bed. The lights in the room are out, but the drapes are open, revealing the bright moon and the many stars. Esther the bulldog lies between them at shoulder level, her head on her paws, her forehead wrinkled and worried looking. Lester and Candy are fully clothed, on top of the covers, and Candy is holding Lester’s handkerchief pressed against her nose. After a moment, she says, “Okay, I think I’m done crying now. Sorry.”

Lester looks over at her. “Oh, no; don’t apologize. I’m honored! Truly. My wife used to say that to cry in front of someone was to offer them a compliment.”

“She did?”

“Yes.”

“What else did she used to say?”

He looks out at the night sky. “Well, she called stars silent commentators. Ancient, silent commentators.”

“Huh. That’s nice. What else?”

Lester’s chest hurts now, but he says in as easy a tone as he can muster, “Oh, she said a lot of things.” He thinks about how, after the reconciliation that came after their first major argument, he told Kathleen he feared he’d lost her forever. And she said, “You know that song ‘Till the End of Time’? Please review the lyrics, and then report back to me.” But what he tells Candy is, “She used to say this all the time: ‘If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em harder.’”

Candy laughs, and it makes Lester’s spirits rise. Then she props herself up on one elbow and says, “I’m sorry. I’ve taken you away from the party.”

“You didn’t take me away. I wanted to come with you. For one thing, duty called. A dog with love handles is a dog that needs attention!”

“Oh, I was so scared she had a tumor. What a relief that she’s only fat! I love fat!”

Lester rubs the top of Esther’s head briskly. She licks him and snorts happily into his hand. Her tail is wagging so fast it’s nearly a blur. “Don’t you listen to her; you’re gorgeous,” Lester tells the dog. “Liz Taylor should have such beauty marks!” And then, to Candy, “You’re gorgeous, too, by the way.”

He sees her pull back slightly into herself, the automatic response of many pretty women who have been complimented too many times for reasons more suspect than sincere. “Oh, well, money helps,” she tells him. “I’m on a first-name basis with more than a few plastic surgeons. I think I alone support many branches of the cosmetics industry.”

“I didn’t mean how you look, I meant how you
are
.”

This seems to surprise her, and she starts crying again.

“Uh-oh,” he says.

She waves her hand and blubbers, “It’s just… Well! I guess a lot of things are hitting me all at once.”

He could say the same. They had talked about so many things! From a random and seemingly weightless remark at a dinner table to… this! He’d sat next to Candy Sullivan only to… well, to sit next to
Candy Sullivan
. To say a brief hello. And, if the truth be told, to have the opportunity to look at her close up—God, she was something. Then he’d intended to take a place at the nearly empty table where Ben Small was sitting. He was going to face the door so he could see when Mary Alice arrived, then wave her over to sit beside him—he had expected that, after their lovely afternoon, they might have dinner together. For starters.

But then he formed what felt like an immediate bond with the Homecoming Queen. “Candy Sullivan?” he said, and she turned around and looked up at him. He extended his hand and reminded her of his name—he’d discovered that not all of the people there saw well enough anymore to read the name tags.

“Oh,
Lester
!” she said. “I know you. I remember you very well!”

She removed her purse from the empty seat beside her and he sat down and said, “So. The last time I saw you was the day before you left to go to Boston for college, BU wasn’t it?”

“It was! What a memory!”

“Well,” he said. “What a goil. Everybody knew everything about you. That day, you were in line ahead of me at the Dairy Queen. Wearing… well, Candy, I think you would have to call them short shorts. And a white blouse, knotted at your waist. You were barefoot, and you had a daisy stuck between a couple of your toes. You were talking about how you were going to marry a neurosurgeon and have five children.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “Did we talk that day?”

“Nah. I just overheard. You were surrounded by your usual friends and admirers. A guy couldn’t wedge his way in with a… with a wedger.”

Her eyes shifted briefly away from him. “Yes, well.” She touched her right earring, her left. “And you were off to college, too. The University of Minnesota, right?”

Lester laid his hand over his heart. “I’m touched you remember.”

She tilted her head and studied him. “I remember a lot about you, Lester Hessenpfeffer. I remember how smart you were, and how kind. How you were going to be a vet. How a lot of people were really awful to you. And how I never stood up for you when I could have.”

He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, really. I turned out fine. I’m happy! I’m a vet! So
did
you marry a neurosurgeon and have five children?”

“Not exactly,” she said; and then her chin began to tremble, and she started telling him things that would have made him leaving her table rude, if not impossible. From the corner of his eye, he had seen Mary Alice come in, and he’d thought to give her some sort of sign—a finger held up in the air? A quick lift of his chin that would let her know he’d be right over? But then he’d noticed Pete Decker with her and thought,
Huh! Well, that’s that
. Oh, he’d intended to validate his assumptions, not for nothing had he been trained in the scientific method. But as his talk with Candy grew more intimate, the idea of him pursuing a relationship with Mary Alice (sitting with
Pete Decker
, why was she sitting with
Pete Decker
?) became less and less urgent.

Dinner was delivered, and Candy sat staring at her plate. Then she began to cry into her filet mignon, tears suddenly spilling over and apparently taking her by surprise. “Oh!” she said, and quickly dabbed at her eyes with her napkin, her head down—embarrassed, he thought. “Gosh!” she said. The tears kept coming, and finally he gently took her arm and led her into the hall, where her crying turned into all-out sobbing. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m all right. Really. I’m so sorry. I’ll just go up to my room. I’m fine.”

“Well. No, you’re not.” He was frustrated by a sudden desire to do something for her without having any idea what that might be. He imagined himself picking her up, swooping her into his arms, her white dress and her sparkly purse and the dinner napkin she still held clutched in her hand, and… what? Asking her if she’d like to take a truck ride with him to visit Elwood Masten’s eleven golden retriever puppies, seven and a half weeks old and each one better looking than the next? Abandon their reunion dinner in favor of brown sugar meat loaf and carrot mashed potatoes and heavily buttered green beans and gooseberry pie at the Clean Plate Club? Which fortunately or unfortunately (depending on whether he was wearing his medical professional hat or his starving man hat) was right across the street from his clinic? Samson the mastiff had availed himself of half a sandwich made from that meat loaf when Lester had carelessly left his take-out lunch on top of the reception desk and Jeanine had turned her back, and that is probably why Samson never cowered in the waiting room anymore. No, Lester decided. He would give Candy her privacy.

He did punch the elevator button for her, though, and when the doors opened, the people who stepped off stared with blatant, nearly openmouthed curiosity. Lester stepped between them and Candy and thus ended up on the elevator with her. When they reached her floor, he walked her to her door. She hesitated, then said, “I wonder… would you come in and have a look at my dog? I’m sorry to take advantage of you this way. But I just noticed this awful swelling on both her sides, and I’m so worried that she—”

“I’d be happy to have a look,” he said, and when she slid the key into the door, he couldn’t help it; his heart sped up. And it wasn’t
that
(although who could be a straight man with a functioning brain and not have the briefest of scenarios occur to him when a beautiful woman like Candy unlocks her hotel room to him?). But it wasn’t that he wanted to have sex with Candy Sullivan. It was that he felt retroactively invited to sit at the Table. He supposes some things never go away. Jeanine’s mother lives in an old-age home where there’s a Popular Table. “It’s just like junior high, I swear,” Jeanine had told him. “The royalty still saving seats for each other.”

“Is your mother a member of the royalty?” Lester had asked.

“No,” Jeanine had said, “and it drives her crazy. She says she doesn’t care, but when I go to have a meal with her, all she does is watch them. Oh well, one of them will probably die soon, and then maybe she can move up the ladder.”

After Lester examined Esther, he and Candy kept a respectful distance from each other, but then Candy slipped off her heels and stretched out on the bed and said, “Oh, boy, this feels good. Do you want lie down, Lester?” And he did. By that time, each knew that “lying down” was simply acknowledgment of presumed aches and pains and a reduced capacity for alcohol. If Candy weren’t so sad, the situation might have been funny.

They talked about how Candy had been living a life more and more distant from what she had wanted it to be; how lately she had been having difficulty making simple decisions, and this made her feel she no longer knew herself at all. (Do
I like strawberries?
she’d asked herself at the supermarket recently and was literally unable to answer.) She said a weighty despair had insinuated itself into her life and now it was just the norm—every morning, she opened her eyes and searched the bedroom ceiling for long minutes at a time, looking for what was wrong. “What I finally decided,” she said, “is that
everything
is.” She talked, in halting tones, about how she feared her husband in ways too complicated to be fully acknowledged, and how she was ashamed of that fear, and didn’t feel she had anyone she could talk to about it.

“Does he hit you?” Lester asked, a question that seemed balanced between obscene and necessary.

She hesitated, then said, “No. Not… like that. But if he did, it wouldn’t surprise me. Or even make me mad. I would just feel like it
belonged
, somehow.” The elevator dinged out in the hallway and she tensed, then looked quickly at the door as though waiting for a knock. Then she looked back at Lester and sighed. “You know, this diagnosis has been a kind of gift. It’s making me look at things and
see
them.”

She told him she had begun to think about what death really meant and what life really meant—nothing like death to make you think about life! She said a friend’s baby had died at only eight months old from an overwhelming bacterial infection, and that she found consolation in remembering what that mother had put on her baby’s gravestone: “A brief life, but oh so joyful.” Candy said she intended to move toward joy, if only for the last several months of her life.

Lester talked about himself, too. It seemed that a certain type of intimate exchange could elicit more and more soulful admissions, especially if you’d had a few drinks and were experiencing the kind of jaunty surrealism a high school reunion can bring. Lester told Candy that he loved his little neighbor girl like a daughter, and that she had used his house for her last sleepover party because her mother had said never again. He said he had served seven little tomboys spaghetti and meatballs at the picnic table in his backyard, and then made ice cream sundaes, which he believed he was not alone in thinking were absolutely fantastic. He told her he’d recently offered Miranda another such party and she had refused him because of the unacceptable amount of time he’d spent hanging around the girls last time, thus preventing them from talking. Which she hadn’t wanted to tell him, but since he’d asked about doing it again… When Lester said he’d do better next time, Miranda said all right, how about two Saturdays from now, which by the way was the day he had promised to let her sit in on the day’s surgeries, and he had readily agreed. Tacos, he was going to give those girls this time, and a repeat of the sundaes. Then he was going to turn over the living room to them, and retire to his bedroom to read.

He described to Candy the impact his wife’s and unborn child’s deaths had had on him, not only right after they happened, but also the ripple effect of the ever-transforming but never quite resolving grief. “I guess I believe I owe it to her to keep on feeling the grief,” he said.

“Hmm,” Candy said. “I wonder. I wonder if you asked her if she wanted you to feel such pain, what she would say.”

“She would want me to remember her,” Lester said. “I know that.”

“Yes, but in pain? How about another way? How about honoring the love you shared by loving someone again?”

“Well, funny you should say that,” he said, and told Candy about how he was very attracted to Mary Alice Mayhew, of all people.

“What do you mean, ‘of all people’?” Candy said, and Lester said nothing; he was embarrassed he’d put it that way. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

“She just didn’t
try
,” Candy said. “She was too smart to.”

Lester nodded. “You’re right. And you know, I had lunch with her today, and I noticed… She smells like
outside
.”

“Well, that
alone
!” Candy said, smiling.

“But she’s down there with Pete Decker. So I don’t know. I guess I kind of blew it.”

“Oh, come on,” Candy said. And something about the way she looked at him made him believe he still had a chance after all.

They have just agreed to head back downstairs when they hear the tinny sound of salsa music, and Candy sighs. “My husband calling,” she says. “I’ll bet you a million dollars. I should never have turned the phone back on.”

She pulls the cellphone out of her purse, looks at the caller ID, then puts it back in her purse without answering it. “Yup,” she says. “That’s who it is. Cooper Anthony Armstrong. My husband.”