But Josh and I, I would learn, had grown up similarly: middle-class Jewish families, suburban public schools, some grease in the wheels but never enough. And while I didn’t condone his profession, let’s just say I was in a position, theoretically, to understand it. Waitressing was hardly fun, and it brought in a lot less money. Plus Josh was free to choose any summer internship he pleased. Heck, he could have spent every summer listening to his expensive stereo and reading his beloved Heidegger, and he still would have been less “overconcerned” with money than I was with my sixteen-hour days.
But theory is not practice, and living with the campus drug dealer was not a picnic. The doorbell rang at all hours. I was always nervous that Josh—and therefore I, for not reporting him—would get arrested. I’d often come home from the library late at night to find my living room filled with students or random locals, their shirts tie-dyed, their pupils dilated, staring at Pee-wee’s Playhouse or listening to Jefferson Airplane at ear-splitting decibels, dancing around in ecstatic circles, watching their hands leaving trails. “Isn’t it beautiful?” they’d exclaim, and I’d say, “Yeah, it’s beautiful, but if you could just turn it down a teeny, tiny notch so I can study…,” and before I could say please, they’d turn to Josh and say, “Wow, your roommate’s a real bummer.”
Sometimes there were freak-outs. “My girlfriend just gave birth to a baby in a toilet. We didn’t even know she was pregnant!” one customer, a local Cambridge kid, the otherwise highly intelligent son of a philosophy professor, once cried. This turned out not to have been a hallucination but an actual baby in a toilet. I heard he later killed himself—not in our living room, thank god—while sucking on a tube of nitrous with a plastic bag draped over his head. Another buyer spent several hours explaining, in excruciating detail, his aversions to both food and excrement, which he viewed with equal revulsion. Josh himself could tumble into deep troughs of hallucinogenic despair, cheered only by the sight of his pet python devouring a mouse.
Outside it might have been 1987, the final go-go days of Reaganomics before the stock market took its Black Monday nosedive, but inside my room it was perpetually 1968. Even then I could tell that this was sad, that—my roommate situation notwithstanding—I would never be able to feel the same kind of nostalgia for my college years as the characters in The Big Chill because the experience itself was removed from reality, filtered through the past, then manufactured, like LSD.
After skipping the first few roommate reunions, I finally felt bold enough, distant enough from our shared past, to bury the hatchet and attend one. I even offered to host it at my parents’ house on the Delaware shore. Everything was going swimmingly that weekend: Serena and I were getting along; our kids were playing well together; even the weather was agreeable. Then, the morning we were packing up to leave, I was told that the East Coasters would be splitting the cost of the West Coasters’ plane fares, as they did every year.
“Huh?” I said. I knew every year the reunion was held on a different coast, but I figured that this was the understood cost of participation: once every two years, half the group would spend more than the other half to participate, but it would all even out in the end. If you couldn’t afford it, I thought, you didn’t go that particular year, end of story. To complicate matters, some of the women—we were all now definitely women—had purchased their tickets using miles, which meant a convoluted algorithm had to be invented to figure out each person’s cost of lost opportunity. I reminded the group that I’d hosted us gratis. That our presence had meant my parents, who counted on rental income from the house to pay the mortgage, would not be earning any that particular week. That this was the first reunion I’d ever attended (and probably, judging by this nonsense, I thought, my last).
Once again the issue of money had reared its head, but this time we were all, more or less, feeling the pinch, paying for babysitters and preschools and little shoes and rents and mortgages we could ill afford, all while earning less, in adjusted income, than our parents. While the Big Chill generation may have been able to wax nostalgic over their bohemian past, they did so in a well-appointed house that was big enough to host all of them. Our generation, meanwhile, not only has little in the way of cultural wealth over which to get misty-eyed, we are also the first generation of Americans to be less well-off than our parents, whose homes we borrow in order to host our reunion weekends because our own homes, which many of us don’t even own, are too small. Which means all of us in my former rooming group are now at least concerned with—if not “overconcerned” with—money. None of us has the luxury not to be.
Even so, my questioning of the groupthink socialism raised a few eyebrows. I felt exactly as I had when I’d refused to wear the antiapartheid armband back in 1986: sure that my reasoning carried just as much logic as my roommates’, yet made to feel, once again, like the fool. And though I enjoyed the company of many of the women individually and stayed in touch with a few, the experience of the group as a whole, I decided, wasn’t worth the cost of the airfare. Mine or anyone else’s.
Then Addie’s husband, Tim, died, and all bets were off. Just after the second anniversary of his death, Addie invited the group up to her cottage in the Catskills, where Tim had died in his sleep, and those of us who could go went. The house only had two bedrooms, she said, but we’d manage.
Addie and I had grown quite close during the previous two years, after I suggested that we meet once a week, every week, for lunch following her husband’s death. Our offices were close enough to one another, I said. It would be easy. And though we’d previously had lunch dates here and there, it had been a long time since we’d been intimate friends.
Addie and I, along with Ursula, had actually moved to Paris together after graduation, but since then our lives had diverged. Addie had moved back to the States, while I’d worked four more years abroad. She spent long hours flexing her artistic muscles in the independent film world, while I traded the insanity of war photography for a steady job in television. I gave birth to a couple of children; she decided she never wanted any. The week I relinquished the safety net of my TV job for the rickety bridge of full-time writing, Addie landed a position as a staff editor on my former show. We literally just kept missing each other, sometimes by days.
But when we ran into each other on the street near our new offices a few years later—Addie had now left her network job to begin working as a union rep for film editors; I’d rented a writing studio outside my apartment—it felt as if fate had finally handed us the means to reconnect. Soon thereafter her husband died. Then we began having lunch every Monday.
We talked mostly about the present at first and about her: her loneliness; her grief; the seemingly insurmountable task of conquering them. Then, as time wore on, we began tiptoeing our way around the past. “Remember Josh and his python?” I said. Addie, who’d actually dated Josh during the year I lived with him, smiled, then winced. She hadn’t agreed with the way things had gone down, way back when, she said. She’d always felt bad about it.
“Forget about it,” I said. “It’s over and done.” It had been nineteen years since my banishment from the group, and I was finally, thrillingly, over it.
That hot July weekend in the Catskills we were five. Clara, our former moody beauty, had to stay back in Philly with her daughters and her husband for reasons I no longer recall. After several incarnations, Clara had wound up as a landscape architect. And though she’s still as physically stunning—if not more so—as she was at eighteen, her dark moods no longer threaten to swallow her. In fact she is, though none of us, including her, would have ever predicted it, one of the happier members of our group.
Serena, now a researcher at Johns Hopkins, also stayed home with her family. I don’t remember what the actual reason was either, but I think it was that her partner, a professional singer, had said she would be on the road that weekend, leaving Serena to care for their two children. Turned out the summer before our senior year, when I was having reven
ge sex with her boyfriend, Serena was exploring her attraction to women, which didn’t make my actions that summer any less treacherous, but still. I liked to think of it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for my conscience, which had been feeling worse ever since Serena called several years ago, sometime after my crazy e-mail, to say she was sorry. Her apology was heartfelt and sincere, and I was grateful for it. Years later, as my father would lie dying in the cancer ward at Johns Hopkins, it would be Serena who’d rush over to hold my hand.
The rest of our group arrived Friday night and settled in for the weekend. Since I was the one with the seven-week-old baby, I was put in the second bedroom upstairs, across from Addie’s. The others said they’d camp out in the living room. The door to Addie’s room was ajar as I lugged both baby and his gear up into the guest room, and I felt a distinct chill as I passed by her room and stole a peek inside to see the bed where Addie’s forty-year-old husband had died, alone in his sleep, of an epileptic seizure. A film production electrician for the majority of his professional life, he’d been going upstate one night a week to take a course in water management. He’d wanted a change, he told Addie, perhaps a chance to live full-time in the country. Addie had been encouraging, saying she would follow him wherever he went. But he’d gone off, alone, she lamented, to the one place she couldn’t join him.
We all die alone, I kept telling her, but of course I knew what she meant. We are social creatures, we humans. We form dyads. We create groups. We believe, in the depths of our souls, that together we are better than apart.
We cooked a big dinner Saturday night, serving it on the screened-in porch in the vain hope of finding cool air. As we ate and drank and wiped our brows, we began opening up about our lives.
Ursula was trying to decide whether or not to divorce her husband. She talked about her Al-Anon meetings. About the times she feared her spouse had driven under the influence with the kids. About the mess her marriage had become. She worried that her job as a nonprofit consultant—her most recent battle had been to thwart the introduction of abstinence-only curricula in the California public schools—would not pay the mortgage if she got divorced. She seemed, for the first time since I’d known her, unmoored. As brilliant as she was at deconstructing the plots of difficult novels, her own life’s narrative had her stumped.
Rose, as per her usual maternal self, offered Ursula empathy and wisdom, both with regard to the schism and with the issues of dividing up real estate. Though she’d never officially married, Rose had had a long-term relationship and owned a home with a man for many years before the whole thing disintegrated. She’d wondered at the time whether it might have been easier, in certain ways, to go through an actual divorce, to somehow formally mark the pain of the rupture. “At least you have your kids,” she said to Ursula, trying her best to hide the anguish I knew, from previous discussions, she felt at having reached forty without having had a child of her own. She’d devoted her entire adulthood to working tirelessly for reproductive health, choice, and rights, and now her own window of choice was shutting. The mother of all of us had no one of her own to mother.
As if on cue, my son Leo, the product of one careless night, woke up from his nap screaming. “You know,” I said, struggling to undo the clasp on my nursing bra, “sometimes I wouldn’t mind a few moments of childlessness.”
Rose smiled. Leo latched on.
“No kidding,” said Ashley. “Me too.” Ashley had gone through the most radical transformation of us all. Turning her back on what she saw as the empty values of her upbringing—competitive sports, competitive schools, competitive food, clothing, and housing—she and her husband had retreated into the woods, living off the grid in a teepee at first, then in a yurt when the children were born, then, after outgrowing the yurt, in a small cob house, which they built with their own hands out of mud, sand, and straw.
I’d flown out to visit her several years earlier, when she still lived in the yurt, and what struck me most was not necessarily the peace and tranquility of the place, which she had in spades compared to my hustle-bustle life in New York, but the hours of Ashley’s day that had to be spent maintaining this simple lifestyle, whether through chopping wood or tending the garden or fetching eggs or scooping out the waste from the composting toilet. Self-sustaining living had at first been her husband’s passion and profession, his raison d’être, but through osmosis and necessity, it had become Ashley’s occupation as well. And as the five of us went around the table, discussing our professional feats and failures, the reality of this suddenly struck her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “All of you have jobs! Real jobs and real identities apart from your families. How is it that I’m the only one of us who doesn’t?”
We tried to point out that her lifestyle was her job, but she wasn’t buying it. “I spend every day taking care of my kids,” she said. It was nice having all that time with them and lack of structure, she explained, but…Her voice trailed off. Then, perking up, she told us about her decision to unschool them.
“Unschool?” we all said. We knew she homeschooled her children, but none of us had ever heard of unschooling.
It was a movement she’d read about before the children were born, Ashley explained. Letting children learn not from lessons but from simple everyday interactions with their environment.
“But what do they actually do all day?” one of us wondered.
“Mostly they just play in the woods,” she said.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Technically,” said Ashley, “yes.”
As she elaborated, I could tell by our expressions, by the way we shifted uneasily in our seats, that none of us agreed with such a radical choice—while we were not exactly Harvard women, we were women who’d gone to Harvard—but I saw it as a testament to how far we’d come as a group that no one felt the need to castigate Ashley for not wearing the armband. Much of what she said about pressure and stress made sense. None of us with children in regular schools could honestly say we were happy with the hours of homework our kids were burdened with every night. They’re like those 1984 Macs: it’s only a matter of time before their brains sprout bombs.
Meanwhile, as Ashley kept talking, telling us about her meditation classes and her colorful neighbors and her quest for spirituality, I kept thinking about that scene in The Big Chill when Tom Berenger takes William Hurt to task for the person he’d become. “We go back a long way,” his character, Sam Weber, says, “and I’m not gonna piss that away ’cause you’re higher than a kite,” to which Hurt, as Nick, snaps, “Wrong, a long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time; you don’t know anything about me.” When I’d first heard that line uttered, in 1983, it struck me as callous, cold, something only Nick would say. But now, twenty-three years later, I realized I myself was capable of saying such words. Moreover, they’d be true.
For my fortieth birthday, a few months earlier, my friend Jennifer had asked me to put together a group of twelve women I love. For the most part, the women I love are not only jesters like me, but they are women with whom I stay in regular contact, whose lives look the most like mine: kids, husbands, careers, adulterous fantasies, the usual boring struggles faced by those of us knuckleheaded enough to try to make a go of it in New York without a banker’s salary. Actually, one of the women I invited was a banker, but we didn’t hold it against her. Two of the women had even overlapped for a year with me in Adams House, but I am two years older, so it would have been uncool to hang out with them then, though today I count them as two of my closest confidantes.
I’d considered inviting Addie to that birthday gathering, but I realized my friendship with her is its own entity, with its own set of rules, wholly separate from both my current group and the shared group of our past. We are our own dyad. And that seems to be enough for both of us.
After our dinner on the screened-in porch, after we’d depleted our bank of stories and had caught up, more or less, with one another’s lives, we carried our plate
s into the kitchen and started to clean up. I don’t remember what was on the stereo at the time, but I know we didn’t dance to it. And we didn’t sing. And we didn’t wax nostalgic for the group we once were. We just wiped the surfaces clean and took whatever small pleasures we could from those particular women at that particular moment in time, knowing that twenty-four hours later, regardless of our feelings on the matter, we’d be back out in the cold world.
The Graveyard of Old Beaus
I took my daughter to see the Château de Versailles in late February. Green tarps covered the statues. The fountains were dry. Gray clouds hovered over the palace grounds like penumbral ghosts.
“Huh,” I said, tightening my scarf against the cold. “It’s kind of depressing this time of year, isn’t it?” The two of us lingered at the top of the château’s grand staircase, unsure if the descent to the wide expanse of withered flora below was even worth it. Twenty years earlier, I’d nearly tripped skipping down those same stairs, when the gardens were in bloom, and I’d just graduated college, and life spread before me like the vista itself, stretching out toward an infinite horizon.
Sasha shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “I can still write about it.” She took her journal out of her knapsack, grabbed my hand, and led me down the stairs toward a marble bench where we sat, side by side, facing the château. While Sasha rummaged around for a pencil, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to have been living in that palace, wandering those hallways, married to the kind of man, like Louis XIV, who could have conceived of such a monument to himself.
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