The Local News (41 page)

Lola Pepper had hips now. Her red hair had lost some of its shine, looking almost brown, and her skin tone, if possible, had deepened since adolescence, blending more with the myriad freckles, which no longer seemed such a distraction. David Nelson had a pregnant wife, a plain-faced woman with long, unstyled hair hanging down to her tailbone. They lived in Ames, Iowa, where he was a first-year assistant professor in poli sci at Iowa State. Jerold Terry had grown a gut and managed a paint store in Livonia. He talked with interest about things like semiglosses and the need to use a primer even if you’re going darker.

We were all squeezed into a staticky, windowless hotel ballroom, a makeshift bar spanning one wall, a DJ sequestered at the far edge of a dance floor. People talked loudly, laughing in dramatic guffaws. Already several women (were they the girls from the tennis
team? student council?) danced in a tight, shoeless circle to an old song about
Rock your body,
their brightly polished toenails straining against their nylons.

Gene stood at my side, a hand loosely gripping my elbow, drinking a plain tonic to my gin and tonic. The nap had helped him a little, but he still had the greenish cast and glassy eyes that often preceded a bout of full-blown sickness. A stream of people were upon us, eager to spout opinions about the election once they found out where we lived. D.C. was always helpful that way, as a conversation starter, since everyone had a stake. People nodded attentively as I tried to explain my work, or as Gene talked about the letters he was archiving about Mandan Indian trade routes. People smiled and smiled and smiled. I lost count of the number of compliments about my thinness, my short haircut, how I barely looked over twenty-one.

The afternoon in Danny’s room had already lent a spacy, which-side-up quality to the day, a feeling that only increased among this crowd of half-remembered people, their breathy enthusiasms, their tendency toward standing nearly on top of us and touching their hands to our arms, laughing at everything. If one thing distinguished today from a decade ago, it was that everyone was nice, really nice, almost cloyingly so. I easily lost track of what people were saying, distracted by trying to place them. Thick-thighed Rochelle had only grown thicker, her broad shoulders straining against her blouse. Adam Deselets was almost unrecognizable from his Dungeon Master days, with his full beard and a ponytail past his shoulder blades. Before long, stories of Peace Corps or real estate investments or childbirth or weddings all blurred together.

I steered us regularly back to the bar. Gene asked in the line, “Are you having a good time?” He’d been asking me that since we arrived. I told him yes, which was true; this was more or less pleasant,
mostly benign. But his repeated question made me antsy. Wasn’t I acting like I was having a good time? I thought of adding some glib comment, like
If empty chitchat is your idea of a good time,
but such gibes made Gene uncomfortable. Misanthropy offended his sensibilities.

As we snaked forward in the line, I tried to think of conversation, a funny story or some small intimacy that would elicit that delicious us-versus-the-rest-of-them feeling, which seemed, at times like this, the best reason to have a date. But I couldn’t think of anything good. He was, I could tell, eavesdropping on the conversation behind us, a man talking loudly about his IRA investments. I knocked my shoulder playfully against his. He knocked back.

We’d been there nearly an hour before anyone mentioned Danny, and then it was a virtual stranger, some woman who veered from talk of the renovation on her Hamtramck house to “I think about what happened to your family all the time,” as if this were a natural progression. The lilting concern in her voice suggested a history between us more intimate than anything I could remember. When she’d first approached, I’d recognized her tight blond curls coiled like springs: we’d had a few English classes together.

“It seemed really like a nightmare,” she said, “like so nuts,” and a low tingling moved through the back of my head, the particular alertness that came from being on display in just this way, a state I’d managed to selectively forget in the intervening years.

“It was pretty horrible,” I said, trying to sound appropriate. Gene placed a hand on my waist. I couldn’t remember the last time this topic had passed as small talk. All through college I had successfully maintained a vow never to speak Danny’s name, my only
reminder being a small cut-out picture in my wallet behind my coffee punch card and video store membership. In D.C., I mentioned him only rarely and often inappropriately, when it seemed I was losing my footing or needing to impress, shouting out what had happened to him like a joke or a confession, never getting the response I hoped for, though in truth never having developed into the sort of person who knew exactly what I hoped for anyway.

“I mean, especially now that I’m thinking of having a baby,” the woman said.

“Mmm,” I said. She watched me with an intense stare, an unspoken question lingering between us. There was something daunting in her expression. How I remembered that hungry look, the one that suggested I
owed
something to these people based on this thing we’d all gone through together, or at least that they thought we’d gone through together.

“Your kid’ll be good,” I said. She looked a little confused. I’d meant it to be reassuring, and I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know this woman. That’s what these people had always seemed to forget—I’d barely known any of them. When Gene stepped in to ask how she had found her contractor and was the housing market starting to rebound in Michigan?, I felt an upwelling of love for him. He was so good at asking questions—a champion, really.

Lola intermittently found us in the crowd. Aspects of her were in-controvertibly older-seeming: the grayish circles beneath her eyes, the efficient, layered cut of her hair, the lower center of gravity. She seemed to carry herself from her midsection, emphasizing her more substantial hips and butt. But she was still Lola, still talking in an excited blur, still emphatic and slightly bouncy. I would not have
been surprised if she’d whipped out an UNO deck from her pocket and insisted that we play a round right there on the floor.

She and Gene chatted easily, even though he was still greenish, sweating by now. He kept pushing his damp hair from his forehead. She laughed at a joke he made about two-year-olds being excellent blueprints for despotic leaders. Lola’s husband was dancing with their daughter, cupping the girl beneath her arms and twirling her around. When they returned from the dance floor, the girl let out a piercing scream and Gene said, “Take note, Stalin.” Lola laughed some more.

I held up my empty glass, asked if anyone else needed a refill. Gene said no thanks. I ignored his appraising glance between my glass and me. I rarely drank this much. We were more the wine-with-dinner types. But there was something about the warming web of alcohol that felt essential to this act of reuniting. I had never stood around and socialized en masse with this particular crowd without it.

Lola’s husband asked for a beer. On the way to the bar, I passed David Nelson in a small huddle with his wife, Adam Deselets, and Adam’s wife. David and Adam were tipped close together, talking intently, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder. The women too were on top of each other, Adam’s wife fingering David’s wife’s earlobe, admiring her earring. David’s wife looked like she’d just stepped out of a Wyeth portrait, clean-scrubbed with sturdy cheekbones. Her pregnancy had not yet spread to her face but was fully contained in the swell of her loose beige blouse. As I neared, she placed her hand gently on the other woman’s forearm. They were talking softly, closely, without the loud catch-up of the surrounding clusters, who shouted about army reserves or summers spent backpacking through Europe. This clearly was not the first time they had all met.

I smiled at David as I passed. We’d spoken for a few minutes just
after Gene and I had arrived, everyone shaking everyone’s hand, exchanging names, basic stats. He didn’t look so small anymore, the curled slouch and the slim hands passing somehow as professorial. Absorbed in the talking, he didn’t see me now. I felt silly, marching by with my empty glass, grinning, and soon I stared into the farthest corner of the room, as if I hadn’t noticed them either, though as I overheard the tail end of Adam’s joke—something about Bush in a blender—then David’s laughter and the women’s tittering, I felt a sizzle of self-consciousness. For the second time that day, I was filled with the warm wash of the interloper.

Gene found me at the bar. He was feeling crappier and crappier, he told me, trying to make a good show of it, though he didn’t think he could hold out much longer. He was having a really nice time, he said, looking genuinely crushed. I told him it was fine. He told me he’d take a cab. I told him not to be silly; I’d go back with him.

“No, no,” he told me. “Don’t let me ruin this.”

“You’re not ruining anything,” I said.

The bartender set down the two drinks, the foamy head of the beer dribbling over the side of the pint glass. Gene kept repeating the plan of him taking a cab, me staying. I kept telling him no. He wouldn’t stop, though, and something about this insistent sort of deference—so typically Gene-like, so high road—increasingly ir-rtated me. Soon the appeal of making an early, easy escape was replaced by the appeal of disentangling myself from these negotiations. Gene, if he was so determined, could be the one to go back to the house first, the one to make late-night chitchat with my mom.

“Fine,” I said, though in a way that made him ask whether I was mad. I breathed deeply, trying to get beneath the loose grip of the
gin, which, a few drinks in, could easily make me careless or full of unnecessary candor. I stroked his damp hair and told him no, of course I wasn’t angry, I was sorry he was sick. I told him to take care of himself and get some sleep. I got on my tiptoes and kissed his sweaty forehead. “I’ll miss you,” I said, though already the thought of being able to drift through the ballroom more quietly and alone, without the pressure to perform, made me lighter. I squeezed his hand and insisted, at least, on my being the one to take the cab. He eyed my drink and relented, though not without making a show of stuffing far too much money in my purse, a clot of tens and twenties. I made an unfunny joke about that being plenty for a cab ride directly back to D.C.

I lingered for a while on the periphery, trying just to watch everybody. People drank. People danced. Two former student council members made out in a corner. Everyone gawked openly at the girl who used to be drum major, nose to nose on the dance floor with her wide-hipped, short-haired girlfriend. They wore matching Doc Martens.

When anyone approached—a boy who had been in Hollingham’s class, the cat-eared flag-team girl—I told the same amusing stories that I’d been telling for years: the final I’d slept through at Brown, my shoebox-sized first apartment in D.C. with its Murphy bed and hot plates in lieu of a stove. Lots of people were satisfied by this and volleyed their own stories back: bar exam foibles or the ongoing struggle to find halfway decent maternity clothes. There remained, though, a stubborn knot who were just waiting for me to pause so they could interject something about the tell-all book Elvin Tate was supposedly going to write, or ask if I’d seen the memorial recently, or reminisce about the time my brother and Kent Newman had
turned all the tables upside-down in Fosback’s physics classroom, as if all that other stuff was good and well but could we just get down to the meat of it? The quiet that had settled over us in the last two years of high school—the topic of Danny had naturally faded out by then—was clearly destroyed by the decade-long gap. This again was what people wanted to talk about.

But somewhere into the night the impulse began to seem less predatory than when we were teenagers. This sort of curious prodding, it seemed less to do with me in particular and more to do with the very nature of a reunion. Everyone was doing it to everyone. And really, what else did these people have to talk to me about?

“Remember his sack at the end of that Stafford game?” a paunchy man asked. His name tag said
Ben.
He used to wrestle with Jerold, I was pretty sure.

I did not. I had no recollection of the Stafford game, or any football game for that matter. But something stopped me from saying so, from making the biting, incisive remark about brutality and sport I’d have made ten years earlier. Maybe it was the gin. Maybe it was Ben’s earnestly ruddy cheeks or his silly tie, cartoon bear after cartoon bear lying in hammocks. He had that same expectant expression, that same hungry, searching stare, but for once it didn’t feel oppressive or daunting. I had forgotten what it was like to be regarded this way, to be regarded with my brother in mind. It was, at least for a moment, unexpectedly expansive, a phantom limb returned, filling newly with blood. A phantom phantom limb—I’m not even sure I’d known it to be missing.

“It was a good one,” I said of the Stafford game, and it didn’t feel like a lie. Ben smiled. He clinked his glass against mine. He looked so happy. These people, the way they didn’t know me—it was at least something, something more than the way everyone since didn’t know me either.